. . . hello! after a busy & lovely weekend, a [very] late start here, and how are things? the new week is already filled with a million things, including still more sorting & organising [beribboned boxes of old photographs, long-lost love letters and beautifully written correspondence cards], and plotting & plan-making, meetings and appointments and telephone calls, but also, moments of leisure in all of the busy-ness, for catching up with an old friend, and lattes and mid-day lunch dates . . .
There is something significantly special about vintage and antique luggage pieces. Unlike the compact pieces that are created out of convenience and necessity today: suitable for planes, trains, ships, and automobile travel—the type of luggage needed from years past is quite different.
For instance, baby strollers today are easy to clean and maintain, can carry a number of children at time, and can fold into a fraction of their size, not unlike an origami piece; whereas in the past, more scalable prams were standard, designed with large, more industrial strength metal parts, and were produced with fine materials—some even included beautiful paintings and special storage compartments, and were often decorative and treasured for many, many years.
The same is with luggage; today, we seek quite different conveniences and scales, and yet can appreciate and enjoy the beauty of pieces from a bygone era.
Proficiently and arduously, “constructed by hand from metal, timber, leather and brass, these trunks were highly sought after and favoured by royal families and international high society alike.”
Traveling in style was considered as important as where one would travel. It’s lovely to imagine the sorts of journeys these pieces went on—exotic trips to Africa, trains through Europe, new homes and lands, discovered . . .
[continue reading sarah's tips for purchasing vintage and antique travel cases below . . .] x
