Beneath the Layers

Gill Jessop and Roger Etheridge have spent 30 years rescuing and restoring the original decorative paintwork on antique pine furniture

- Dominique Corlett

We sit in a workshop and chip away at old paint.’ That’s how Gill Jessop modestly sums up the restoration work performed by herself and partner Roger Etheridge at Etheridge & Jessop in Derbyshire. While it is true that removing the layers of paint applied over decades to pine furniture is part of their work, the point of this labour is to reveal and to save what is hidden underneath: the beautiful decoration originally applied to the furniture when it was first made in the 18th and 19th centuries. It is work for which they are widely respected, not least by our columnist Drew Pritchard, who is one of their regular customers.

What’s your background?

Gill: Roger was in oil and gas exploration. During the 1990s he was travelling the world, but at the time we had young children and it wasn’t working for us. He left his job and we went into buying and selling property. We bought a mill to renovate just as the bottom was falling out of the market.

To cut a long story short, we lost everything apart from a van and some furniture. I was interested in antiques and had bought a few nice bits, so we loaded up the van and sold the furniture at an antiques fair. We then began buying at auction and selling at antiques fairs.

Roger: We soon learned what was worth selling and what wasn’t. We got into stripped pine, which was very much in fashion in the mid 1990s, buying old pine furniture covered in paint then getting it stripped and selling it on.