Antiques in Kochi

I am bursting with anticipation for our next trip to India, as we’ll revisit the antiques warehouses in Kochi that we first saw a decade ago. On our shopping list:

• Small cabinets to repurpose as bathroom vanities
• Old windows or other “frames” to use for bathroom mirrors
• Lazy lounging chairs
• Tables (side, coffee, possible dining)
• A few old tall columns
• Bookcases
• Blue chippy painted wardrobe to achieve my guest room vision

We did not take any warehouse photos on our previous Kochi trip, but here’s photos from others who visited and shared their photos online …

Visit this link to see a photo very similar to the warehouse we visited from Flickr user eenar_6, a photo of an enormous urn and a photo of a “chair hospital.” There’s a place in Chennai with hundreds of chairs hanging like this. We’ll revisit there too, possibly for dining chairs.

Check this out from Flickr user thovie333 — piles and piles of stuff to wade through:

 

From Sri Lankan Airlines website:

From Wikimedia, Old Kochi:

From Virtual Tourist:

Most of the antique warehouses and shops are in Jew Town. Wandering through them is a real trip. Sometimes you see the most fantastic visual feasts, like this is a whole boat on display, photo via Travelpod:

From Metro Spiritual blog:

From Elizabeth in India blog:

From the away we go blog, more travelers to India:

These photos give you a sense of what it feels like to be there. Shopping success depends on not getting visually overwhelmed by all the stuff, and being able to zero in on a few special things. Survival of the visual fittest?

While in Kochi, we stayed at Bolgatty Palace.

Lovely place, quiet with beautiful gardens and expansive grounds to make you feel like you really got away. It’s on it’s own island and you take the boat jetty to get to it. However with all the time required to get to Old Town via the boat jetty, taxi, walking to Old Town ferry, taking the Old Town ferry … if you plan to spend most time in Old Town, it might be best to stay in Old Town.

We did not ship any purchases home from this trip. We purchased only what we could carry on the flight home. In Cochin, I got an urli with Lakshmi on one side and a gecko on the other side. Love it! But what I was really seeking was a lounging chair like this found at The Lockhart Collection:

And I found one, for US$100. We lived in Minneapolis at the time, and when the warehouse owner heard that, he mentioned a buyer for a shop in the Minneapolis area (which of course we were familiar with as it carried India goods) had visited the previous day, looking at the same chair. We did not purchase the chair immediately, but returned a few days later. By then, the Minneapolis shop had already purchased the chair. I found it on their website a few months later, of course at US retail price, and it was painful to see. We’ve had several businesses so we fully understand the need to cover costs and make a profit, absolutely no problem with that, it was just knowing it could have been mine for much less including the shipping. This time, I will get my lounging chair …