Why a Sword Company Started a Décor Magazine

Look at what we sell and it can read like several businesses under one roof. Hand-forged longswords and katanas. Marble and bone chess sets. Full suits of armour and helmets. Wall mounts, display stands, sharpening kits. Written out as a list, those look like product lines that arrived by accident.

They did not. There is one reason underneath all of it, and the reason is décor.

Nobody buys a suit of armour to wear it. Nobody buys a marble chess set because it is the cheapest way to play chess. A display stand is not a weapon at all, it is furniture. What connects the whole catalogue is that these are objects people want to live with, in rooms they actually use. That is a decorating question, and we have been selling into it since 2017 without ever really writing about it.

So we have started writing about it. The Modern Antiquary is a new editorial section on this site, and its first issue is live today: twelve pieces about where an unusual object goes in an ordinary house.

What it is not

It is not about turning a spare room into a castle. Almost every room in the first issue is a normal contemporary home, a study with a walnut desk, a basement with a pool table, a rented apartment with a gallery wall, a garage with a car in it. The argument running through all twelve is that a themed room is a costume, and one good object is a decision.

One more thing worth saying plainly, because it shapes everything in there. We make reproductions. Every piece we sell was forged in one of our workshops to a historical design, and it was made this year, not recovered from anywhere. The history in our catalogue is in the design and in the making, never in the age of the object, and you will not find us implying otherwise in any of these articles.

The first issue

It opens with an essay, Where the Vase Used to Go, about the shallow alcove most houses have and the vase most people put in it.

Then seven rooms:

• The study, on dark academia as a real aesthetic and where a blade sits inside it
• The entrance hall, on the narrow strip of wall beside a staircase
• The home bar, on why a curved sabre answers a bar back better than a straight blade
• The finished basement, on the worst light in the house and the most wall
• The small apartment, including what actually holds in a rented plaster wall
• The minimal room, on displaying a katana edge up and handle left, and why
• The garage, on condensation, grinding dust and why a plaque mount is the honest choice over a bench

Then three pieces about the objects themselves:

• The chess set you leave out, on a board as furniture rather than a game
• The panelled library, on putting something newly made in a room that reads as old without it looking like a stage prop
• Living with armour, which is the most number-heavy thing we have published, and the one to read before a full suit arrives at your house

And it closes with the practical one, how to actually mount a blade on a wall: heights, studs, anchor ratings, and why a hook rated for a picture is not rated for steel.

Who wrote it

People did. Every article in the first issue was written by a human being and carries their name, and we edited them rather than replacing their voices. Three writers share the twelve pieces between them.

What comes next

A second issue, and better photographs. The rooms in issue one are design studies rather than real houses, and there are things we still owe you: a full suit of armour photographed on an actual landing, and close work on the things that are hard to see at room distance, Damascus grain, a pommel, an engraved ricasso.

If there is a room in your house you have never known what to do with, that is the kind of problem the section exists for. Start with the first issue.