A Maker’s Story: Jamb’s antiques of the future

During our tour of Jamb’s 25,000sq ft workshop and studio in south-west London, we draw to a halt next to the bright and beautiful components of a chimneypiece. Laid flat on a workbench are several white rectangles of silken marble inlaid with urns, delicate bellflowers, trailing ivy and pink and blue bows – motifs attributed to the 18th-century Italian craftsman, Pietro Bossi.

“It’s an original, right?” Jamb’s co-owner Charlotte Freemantle asks her partner in life and business, Will Fisher. It’s not. In fact, it’s the company’s first attempt at recreating what’s known as ‘Bossi-work’ – an intricate process that involves applying a paste of pigment, plaster and rabbit-skin glue to inlaid marble, before polishing the surface to a mirror finish. It’s impossible to resist the urge to run your palm across the pristine, painted surface.

Confusing reproductions for originals is par for the course at the Jamb workshop. While its gallery on Pimlico Road has established itself as the go-to destination for original and exquisitely reproduced 18th- and 19th-century chimneypieces, lighting and furniture, it’s this workshop in the less salubrious south-western suburb of Mitcham that has become what Will describes as “the throbbing heart” of the business.

“Twenty years ago, I spent my entire life on planes,” he tells us. He was searching for English country-house antiques, which were the focus of his dealing. “Pieces would come into my life and then sell immediately,” he recalls. “It seemed criminal not to capture them in some way – to give them a second life.” The idea to recreate these sleepy, storied artefacts took years to come to fruition, however. “I wasn’t interested in doing something that was merely ‘good enough’,” he says. “I wanted it to be groundbreaking.”

The Mitcham workshop is impossible to find and just as difficult to leave. The team took over the erstwhile armoured-tank factory in 2017 and have gradually reorganised the space into separate areas for finishing, restoration, ideas and manufacturing. There’s also a vast mezzanine level that acts as part antique furniture storage, part photo studio. On the top floor is an open-plan office and meeting room, which is separated from the main space by a clerk’s screen and is stuffed full of curious objets: a tribal ebony figure, fragments of stone statuary, a quiver packed with bows…

Our tour begins on the ground floor, in the restoration workshop with its own “mould library” – a wall-mounted collection of details cast from antique fire surrounds. “With these moulds – and the knowledge of what makes a historically accurate chimneypiece – we can reconfigure any design to our clients’ specific needs,” Will explains.

Passing through the workshop, we encounter a deep, curvaceous mantel carved from breccia vendôme marble – a natural patchwork of peach, pink, grey and ochre quarried from the Pyrenees and found in abundance in 18th-century French palaces. “Many of the materials used around that time either simply don’t exist anymore or their quality has diminished,” Will tells us. “That’s why we’ve also created a library of materials – so each piece can be made authentically from the right stuff.”

Jamb’s world-class library of rare marble and stone specimens is kept in a cavernous storage area, where forklift trucks manoeuvre deftly between corridors of crates that are stacked the full height of the building. With uncommon materials and restoration projects arriving in a steady stream from Europe, the Americas and Asia, the area serves as a three-dimensional in-tray of sorts.

In recent weeks, the installation of a CNC cutting machine has streamlined the production process. “We’re absolutely steeped in tradition and we will never abandon it,” says Will. “But we’re also having to move with the times and to be efficient. Already we’ve learned that, in some ways, this piece of kit will allow us to focus more on the highly skilled hand work.”

Lighting is another defining aspect of the company’s output. As with the chimneypieces, the Jamb is able to offer clients one-off artefacts or impeccable reproductions that have been hand-finished in the Mitcham workspace. Before reaching that stage, each design goes through a rigorous honing process in the “ideas room” – an intimate space in which exceptional lights, gathered from across the globe, are reimagined as or assimilated into new pieces.

When we visit, a Parisian Egyptian Revival lamp from the 1920s, an industrial wall light found in Chicago and a fragile lantern that once lit a street in Dublin are all under scrutiny. “I’m embarrassed to say that this lantern hung here for 18 months before I could figure out what was wrong with it,” says Will of the Irish piece. “Then suddenly, from nowhere, the idea dropped down.” That capricious creative process – coupled with Will’s exhaustive knowledge of the objects he has chased for decades – is what defines everything Jamb produces.

Once the idea is ensnared and digitally rendered using CAD, the individual components are hand-carved in a lightweight materials and beautifully boxed before being sent to the Jamb foundry in Asia, where artisans cast the components using the lost-wax technique. The pieces are then returned to Mitcham, where they are treated to any in the range of finishes, including antique brass, brown bronze, copper, nickel, verdigris and – a recent addition – a punchy cadmium red.

Throughout this process, Charlotte remains focused on the end point: rationalising each design idea into a considered range and announcing the finished product to the wider world. With Jamb’s first complete interior-design project shortly to be revealed, the launch of a new collection of gilded mirrors and a range of Art Deco chimneypieces to oversee, her actual in-tray is comparable in size to the stacks of precious stone we’ve recently walked among.

Before completing the tour, Will uses the ‘Randolph’ – a hefty, multi-faceted lantern based on an original Art Deco find – to illustrate Jamb’s singular approach to craft and longevity. “It’s a marvellous light,” he effuses. “It’s our most complicated design and we spent a fortune developing it. But here’s the weird thing: it’s our least best-selling one,” he says, adding: “Strangely though, I don’t see that as a failure. I don’t want to be surrounded by acres of product that is just ‘good enough’. You’ve just got to believe in what you’re doing and hope that an audience will find you.”

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