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The perfect mix

By Katie Lamb

Photo by Lorne Bridgman

“It’s a weird collision of things,” says co-owner Paul Mercer about his new store Smash, an industrial salvage boutique that, on any given day, might have a set of 19th-century carved wooden doors in stock (found on a recent trip to Argentina) or a vast collection of Japanese samurai armour.

Mercer is an expert picker who has spent the past two decades scouring estate sales and demolition yards around the world. His taste leans toward vintage that’s outside the usual realm of antiques, but his real gift is in combining the old with the newer, like an 18th-century banquet table surrounded by circa 1940 Eames chairs.

To contain his finds under one roof, Mercer opened Smash in a 418-square-metre storefront. The cavernous space’s roughshod look, with creaking floors, high ceilings and exposed brick walls, has the vibe of an old barn, and the place is cluttered with fireplace mantels, garden statuaries, vintage kitchen and bathroom fixtures and door pulls from every era. Before opening Smash, Mercer was co-owner of Post & Beam, another reclaim shop with a more Edwardian sensibility, located right across the street.

Smash is different. Mercer’s wackier finds include a six-metre mural of a 1940s Vegas vignette salvaged from a seedy hotel in Niagara Falls, New York, and a well-ridden Lambretta scooter that’s more objet de design than a useful way to get around town. Art dealer Jerome Jenner has also been brought in to use the walls as a gallery for showing what he calls “lowbrow art from around the world.” Says Mercer, “I want to breathe new life into the local antique trade.”

Smash is paradise for maximalists who don’t believe that less is more.