Aesthetiker is an online store specialising in 20th-century lighting and decor, though that summary undersells this singular trove of design objects.
Melbourne-based duo Toni and Alex Butchart launched Aesthetiker in 2021, and quickly won fans for their deft, tightly curated selection of sconces, pendant lights and lamps in myriad forms. Though anyone can purchase from the site, it’s mostly interior designers who do so.
A model 2202 table lamp by French glass master Max Ingrand epitomises the kind of pieces Toni diligently tracks down. Ingrand designed the hexagonal fixture, made of oxidised brass and etched crystal glass, for Fontana Arte in the 1960s. It is rare, highly collectible and despite its diminutive size – it stands just 12 centimetres high – supremely magnetic.
Toni and Alex are not furniture dealers by trade. In fact, the seeds for Aesthetiker were sown when they were living in Europe for 12 years, both working in automotive design studios – Toni as a digital sculptor and Alex as a studio engineer.
“We lived in a lot of Haussmannian-style apartments,” Toni says. These elegant, historic spaces were fitting “as a backdrop to put in all this vintage furniture we found across Europe”.
An original 1940s Jean Prouvé Potence light. An Omann Jun teak sideboard. A Gae Aulenti Patroclo table lamp for Artemide. By the time the Butcharts returned home after stints in Cologne, Wiesbaden, Munich and Paris, they’d built an impressive personal collection of 20th-century heirlooms.
Dealers they’d bought from while living overseas became some of Aesthetiker’s early suppliers. Toni is fluent in Italian and forged relationships with traders across Europe, but especially Italy. The site is flush with Italian design icons, from sleek modernist lamps by Artemide and Fontana Arte to grand chandeliers and rostrato moulded sconces by legendary Murano glassmakers such as Barovier and Venini.
A pair of 1950s wall lights by Venini, with cascading glass baubles, is one of Aesthetiker’s particularly rare pieces. As is a handsome black table lamp, with a slender brass tripod and hourglass-shaped shade: a 1960s Grasshopper lamp, Toni explains, which she sourced from a dealer in Sicily.
“Those table lamps are extremely hard to find,” she says. “There are so many replicas now but to get an original … One, there’s just not that many around, and two, to have that patina is such a rare gift.”
Aesthetiker’s inventory is constantly changing, but if you visited the site today, you’d find objects from Italy, Germany, Austria, France, Denmark, Sweden and the Netherlands, spanning styles and movements from the 1940s through the 1980s.
“I rarely look for specific items but instead more of a general style or material,” Toni says. Recently, she’s been hunting out pieces in stainless steel and aluminium.
Once an object arrives in Melbourne, Alex’s job begins – rewiring each piece to bring it up to contemporary standards and functionality, cleaning and polishing surfaces, painting and replacing parts where necessary.
“We don’t fully restore everything,” he says. “We like to keep that element of patina – the quality appearance you get with a vintage piece. We want to preserve that and only restore the parts we really need to.
“When something gets here and it’s not quite what we expected, transforming it from one state to the piece you see on the website always blows me away.”
This reminds Alex and Toni of a rare pendant light from Italy, which had three opaline glass shades, nested in a rose-coloured glass plate, suspended from a brass frame.
“The frame was so patinaed it looked black,” Toni says.
“We thought it was painted black,” Alex adds.
“Alex polished that all up, cleaned the glass – it was brown when we got it,” Toni continues. “And it came up a beautiful white opal colour.”
“It was an amazing transformation,” Alex says. “Bringing the pieces into the workshop and going through that process – it’s an intimate experience. You do have to pull them apart, right down to their basics, and fully rewiring an old lamp – which has these tiny little tubes – you get this feeling that you’re really pulling away the layers of this product that’s stood the test of time, and really getting to understand how it was made and the processes that made it.”
Given how long they spend working on each piece, alongside the obvious – just how beautiful these items are – it can be difficult for the Butcharts to part with their discoveries.
“So many times, Toni gets the look in her eye, like, ‘I’m going to take this’,” Alex says.
“There have been a couple of pieces that just never made it to the site,” Toni admits, laughing. “We keep telling ourselves we’re not building a museum – it’s a shop.”
aesthetiker.com.au
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This article first appeared in Domain Review, in partnership with Broadsheet.