Now in its third decade, Mullen’s of Laurel Park in Bray has been catering to its loyal customer base since it opened its doors in 1992, having moved to the larger premises from its original home at Hacketstown Hall in Shankill.
Auctioneer Joe Mullen began his career working in footwear retail and drapery for Kenny’s Shoes, but on a trip to a retail distribution centre in Dublin city, “I got there early and wandered down the quays”.
He became hooked. At that time, quays along the river Liffey and meandering side streets were a mecca for all things old and antique. After cutting his teeth as a porter with Adam’s in Blackrock, he went on to Hazley Godsils (later Hamilton Osborne King) where he began cataloguing and clerking, eventually undertaking valuations and helming the rostrum.
“We didn’t normally have sales in summer but going online has changed all that completely,” he says from the saleroom, which shares a driveway with Woodbrook Golf Club. “Though it was always going to go online, the industry was forced to do so by Covid — but it is the exact same in London. We had very few people live at auctions before Covid but now online buyers are younger and savvier.”
Housing in Ireland is among the most expensive and most affordable in the EU. How does that happen?
Ceann comhairle election key task as 34th Dáil convenes for first time
Your EV questions answered: Am I better to drive my 13-year-old diesel until it dies than buy a new EV?
Workplace wrangles: Staying on the right side of your HR department, and more labrynthine aspects of employment law
“Though we have to do more work on requests for condition reports and further images, by Monday (after a weekend sale) all the invoices have been issued, couriers are collecting stuff and there is no more standing for six to eight hours at a rostrum.”
He says one of the highlights of his career was a Wooton desk that came from a Ranelagh house about 20 years ago: “It was originally owned by Charles Stewart Parnell, and someone paid IR£20,500 for it in a sale at Laurel Park. However, the buyer donated it to the Parnell Museum in Rathdrum.”
The desk was first owned by Parnell’s grandfather, a Commodore in the US navy. It came into the possession of Ulster Bank, and later a Dublin family who auctioned it in 1993. It was purchased by Michael Smurfit, who, on discovering its connection to Avondale House — now the Parnell Museum — gifted the desk to the institution.
Mullen’s latest sale, which ends on Sunday evening, has about 800 lots and is a cross-section of art, furniture, ceramics and oriental china. From a collector in Foxrock who amassed for “years and years” the top lot is an impressive pair of sandstone urns on stepped bases (€8,000-€10,000). Also in the garden section is a set of four Coalbrookdale design garden chairs (€2,500-€3,500). Each chair depicts a season in the oval flower head and foliate pierced back, and being cast iron they can live outside all year round and will not budge in stormy weather.
Two paintings by Charles Lamb feature: Seashore with Figures in a Curragh is reminiscent of Lamb’s Connemara works when he settled to live a simple life in Carraroe (€5,000-€7,000) whereas a smaller work, The Ferry, Fort Stewart, Lough Swilly is expected to fetch €2,000-€3,000.
Brown furniture is still good value in the secondary market, and the sale has some Victorian and Georgian pieces at decent estimates. Desks in are still in demand since so many people are still working at home, and the sale has two: Lot 91 is a good vintage mahogany and brass bound military desk at €800-€1,200. Lot 224, a smaller vintage pedestal mahogany desk, is listed at €300-€400.
A fine 39-piece Copeland Spode Imari pattern dinner service dating from 1850 is seeking €400-€600. Spode, the English pottery company founded in 1770, was the first to develop a new form of porcelain. Originally called Stoke China — as it was produced in Stoke-on-Trent — it was later termed Bone China.
Its name refers to the use of bone ash as a raw material. Once cleaned, bones are heated to 1,000 degrees to sterilise the material, which is then ground and used in the china. Fine bone china is a term used when the china contains at least 30 per cent bone ash, which results in a thinner and lighter weight than normal porcelain.
Though the use of animal bone is still used, with China and India the current top producers, Seattle-based ceramicist Charles Krafft, who died in 2020, took the craft to quite an unusual level. In 1999, he began creating bone china memorials and reliquaries based on the formula invented by Josiah Spode. Instead of animal bones, he substituted human crematory ash for Spode’s’ percentage of animal bone ash. The resulting products, which he called Spone, were “based on consultations with relatives and friends of the deceased”, and were unique, contemporary, if somewhat bizarre, memento mori by commission. mullenslaurelpark.com
