Passion for antique lighting

One thing leads to another, while restoring a newly acquired ancestral home in the village of Lanaudière, two retirees developed a passion for vintage light bulbs so much that they became connoisseurs.

It all started in 2014 when Marc Lorendo and his wife, Michele Gallarno, acquired a massive Victorian home in Saint-Félix-de-Valois that needed to be completely redone.

“After replacing all the period lamps in the house, we continued to research all types and made a beautiful selection of them,” Mrs. Gallarno told us.

The couple initially focused their research on scrap stores and antiques dealers in various regions of Quebec, including Maurice, Lanaudiere, Laurentian, and Quebec.

Mr. Laurendeau and Mrs. Galarneau now own more than 400 lamps – assembled and in separate parts – dating back to the 1940s and earlier. Some even date back to the 19th century.

But the gathering did not come alone. Mr. Laurendeau began restoring lamps and became a lamp maker. Ms. Gallarno is interested in managing ads on the Internet to sell them.

Mr. Laurendeau, a former foreman and carpenter on the premises by training, explained, “I have dismantled the old damaged bulbs and put the electricity back in full, rebuilding all the sockets. I am trying to keep the original bulb copy, but I have completely redesigned the interior of the bulb.”

Then, he meticulously takes care of the shells, lampshades of lamps that made up a very elegant festival in the past.

“You have to pass the shells with an industrial degreaser so that the colors return the same from one shell to another,” the craftsman added, adding that nicotine affects their colors sometimes when people smoke a lot indoors.

So he could spend over twenty hours restoring the lamp and also a lot of time doing research to find out what the original thing was like.

“Mark became very good at his art,” his wife says, noting that some of their rare lamps can sell for up to $2,000.

“I am looking for slightly more exclusive and rarer models,” Mr. Laurendeau explained, adding that Art Deco lamps are in “sliding shade” (with lampshades that are held in place by moving them) and “streamlined” (a 1930s design that favors discreet shapes). elegant and slender with rounded surfaces and corners), as well as opaline lamps (made up of glass shades of milky shades) are the most common.

Thus the house over time became a veritable workshop, and then a kind of museum due to the remarkable collection it houses. We were given the opportunity to go there for the purposes of this report, but the couple are not very welcoming to the public, their sales are done via the web only. For information: https://www.facebook.com/micheleetmarc