I have been wanting to share with you for some time now a picture of the beautiful arbor (or arbour as we would spell it in Australia!) that my husband built. It came about when I showed him a picture of an ornately carved Balinese style timber wedding canopy that I had pinned on my pinterest page from a wedding blog. 'I could build something like that' he said and that evening the ideas began to flow. He would design it to be transportable - in sections that come apart and are able to be reassembled on site. As our new family business is vintage china and accessory hire, our arbor needed to have more vintage elegance than the Balinese canopy which had originally caught my eye and that's when we thought 'veranda'... let's make it look like the entrance to a traditional Victorian villa home or permanent gazebo in a park or country estate, perhaps we could find some authentic cast iron lacework and work that into the design. I was starting to get excited... and here is where it became one of those 'meant to be' stories.
The very next day we went into town for a latte at our favourite cafe which has all manner of vintage wares for sale, a great place for any bowerbird. As I went for my weekly wander through the shop as we were waiting for our coffee, I just happened to glance down at the floor and saw four corner pieces of cast iron lacework from an old veranda. They were magnolia pink and I immediately knew they were meant to be ours. My husband could hardly believe it either and we promptly paid for what would be the most gorgeous feature of our soon to be built arbor.
We knew it would need more than just four corners of lacework to give it the look of a veranda and just one week later we found what we were looking for. A last minute decision to call in at an antique shop in another city where the china is usually too highly priced for our budget but out the back we discovered a shed stacked with all manner of furniture and vintage wares. Yet, another glance at the floor (it pays to look down!) and stacked under a table were more corners and panels of cast iron lacework. Not just any lacework but the exact match for our previous find and painted the same shade of magnolia pink. Could it be that they were salvaged from the same old house and ended up for sale in different cities? We were scared to ask the price as we had been looking on ebay and knew that people were asking hefty prices for authentic cast iron lacework so when the lady gave a very reasonable figure for all the panels we didn't hesitate.
Hope you have enjoyed seeing our arbor and hearing of the providential story behind its construction. We are still hoping to find two more corner pieces to really finish it off and I know they are out there somewhere!