Designing with Salvaged and Reclaimed Materials

Maria welcomes you into the Retrouvious salvage warehouse, located in North West London. A treasure trove of reclaimed delights and endless possibilities, it's the beating heart of her business.

Salvage yards can often feel intimidating and overwhelming as there are so many different ways to use each material. Join Maria as she demystifies the process by picking out a few examples, and talks through how they can be used.

One material that is often at salvage yards in abundance is doors. Maria covers the breadth of materiality available, what to look out for and how to approach bringing new life to even the most uninspiring designs.

In this lesson, Maria discusses the common issues that arise with using salvaged doors and shares the different options for solving them.

Lighting can be an expensive part of an interior, so people are often anxious to get it right. Maria offers her design advice, and suggests affordable vintage solutions that offer maximum flexibility.

Discover how to include unique and interesting pieces of salvage in your home that have been rescued from places such as museums, libraries and universities.

At Retrouvious, one of the staple materials has always been old Iroko wood desk tops and laboratory surfaces. Being a tropical hardwood, they are very precious and important to save, so Maria loves to find new uses for them.

You might not instantly associate fabric with salvage and reclamation yards, but it is more common than you think. Join Maria as she offers suggestions for how it can be reused.

As with so many things in life, there are highs and lows in salvage. Something you think may be a guaranteed winner and is 100% worth salvaging, can turn into a huge liability. Maria explains why certain materials can be problematic.

Maria explores the huge amount of opportunity to use salvage within a bathroom, and suggests lovely materials that can be used to create beautiful schemes bursting with interest and character.

Reusing antique taps and sanitaryware in a bathroom can work really well, but there are certain things to consider and be mindful of. Maria points out the pitfalls and how to avoid them.

In addition to flooring, wall coverings and furniture, salvage can also be used as a building material. Using a current project as an example, Maria demonstrates how she is using reclaimed building materials.

Maria welcomes you into her apartment in Marylebone, London; a special place that has been her family home for many years. It has also played a pivotal part of her salvage journey.

Learn where the opportunities are within a kitchen to use salvaged materials and discover exactly what Maria has used in her own space that has stood the test of time and busy family life.

Salvaged timber is one of the most flexible reclaimed materials. Its form and appearance varies hugely depending on its previous usage, and Maria loves to lean into the quirks of the material when thinking about how to reuse it.

Old gym floors have become a popular material to salvage; the timber is relatively inexpensive and pretty widely available. In this bathroom, Maria wanted to explore a new way to use it.

Every now and again, you come across large pieces of salvage that are one of a kind. With these items, it’s especially important to think beyond their original use and get creative when incorporating them into a scheme.

It’s incredibly important to use reclaimed timber in an environmentally responsible way. Maria explains how to be respectful of the properties of different woods, and how this impacts where they are best used.

Much like choosing paint colours, the reclaimed materials that you use will inform the overall palette of a room. Maria demonstrates how it’s important to aim for cohesion, as well as an appropriate use of materials depending on the overall mood and purpose of the room.

In this lesson, Maria encourages an open minded approach to using salvaged materials, and asks you to consider a different approach to usage and installation.

Completing the tour of her home, Maria’s own bathroom is the perfect place to speak about another popular material to salvage that has not yet been touched upon; stone and marble.

For this section of the course, Maria runs through common materials that often come up at salvage yards and shares her tips and tricks of how best to use them. First up, reclaimed block parquet flooring.

Delve deeper into additional aspects of using reclaimed parquet, including more laying pattern ideas that you may want to consider.

Maria loves using pine for flooring due to its flexible and unpretentious nature. She’ll be taking you through the different looks you can achieve, and how.

It’s important to also think about any materials that you will be removing from a project in order to install the salvage of your choice, as these will become the salvage of the future.

For the final part of the course, you’ll be joining Maria at another project of hers, a townhouse in London. It is architecturally different to what she has shared with you so far, and is much more traditional in style.

When undertaking any renovation, Maria encourages you to first take stock of what already exists and if you don’t want to keep it, consider exactly how it can be repurposed within your new design. In this project, it was the windows.

A firm favourite of Maria’s and a time honoured classic, tongue and groove panelling is incredibly versatile and suits a variety of spaces. Discover how it has been used in this home to great effect.

Historically fireplaces played a vital part in heating our homes. While this isn’t necessarily the case today, they still remain an important aesthetic feature within a room for many people and a popular item to salvage. Maria discusses what to look out for when sourcing your own.

Maria demonstrates how to use vintage textiles in a way that feels fresh and modern, fit for a contemporary interior scheme.

The master bathroom in this project is full of reclaimed materials. Maria offers her top tips for using salvaged marble, basins, baths and vintage lighting.

Staircases are another element within the home where salvaged materials can be used, however there are quite strict building regulations to bear in mind.

Maria offers some final words of encouragement.