Antique Restoration – Murphy’s Antiques
In a workshop scented with timber shavings and linseed oil, Meade & Mason practise the slow and exacting discipline of antique restoration — returning life to objects shaped by other hands, in other centuries.
Their work is not renovation. It is conversation.
Every piece that enters the workshop carries its own story — worn armrests polished by generations, drawers that have swollen and shrunk with Queensland humidity, veneers lifted by time. Restoration requires restraint as much as skill: knowing what to repair, what to stabilise, and what must remain untouched.
Using traditional joinery, hand tools, hide glues and historically appropriate finishes, Meade & Mason honour the integrity of each object. They work with the original maker — sometimes separated by 150 years — reading tool marks, understanding timber movement, deciphering earlier repairs. The aim is never to erase history, but to preserve it.
True restoration is patient work. It may mean dismantling and rebuilding a cabinet from the inside out. It may involve recreating missing elements by hand, matching grain and patina so precisely that intervention becomes invisible. The craft lies not only in technical ability, but in judgement.
In a culture that favours replacement, antique restoration is a quiet act of resistance. It insists that objects are worth saving. That materials carry memory. That continuity matters.
Through their hands, furniture is not simply repaired – it is stewarded forward.
