Interior designer Katie Thompson’s studio, a converted house in Observatory, Cape Town, is packed floor to ceiling with junk.
Some of it has been repurposed, upholstered in pretty florals; other bits of furniture, clocks, jugs and knick-knacks await their second lease on life.
Since starting the design company, Recreate, in 2009, Thompson has been selling recycled furniture and interior and lighting accessories from her eclectic studio, which is as much a paradise for her as it is for any fellow hoarder. Whether it’s a cookie-tin vase you’re after or a sofa made from a suitcase, Thompson will have it. Or she will make one for you. “I love creating functional art from discarded non-functional junk,” Thompson says on her website.
One of her latest creations is a range of desk lamps made from obsolete desktop machines. Mr Oliver, Mr Remington and, the latest in the range, Mrs Mercedes, are all desk lamps made from old typewriters. A close relative, Mr Sumlock, is a lamp made from a Sumlock adding machine, an ancestor of the modern pocket calculator. Pictured here is the Mr Oliver Typewriter Desk Lamp, a vintage Oliver typewriter to which an equally vintage lamp fitting is attached to the carriage (the part of the typewriter where the paper is meant to go).
Patented in the United States in 1895, the Oliver was the first “visible effect” typewriter. In other words, it was the first typewriter that made it possible for the user to see the text appear on the page as he or she typed. In 1888 the Oliver’s inventor, a Methodist priest named Thomas Oliver, made his first typewriter out of strips of tin cans. He made this rattling, rustic conglomeration with a vision of a machine that he could use to transcribe his sermons legibly so that they could be disseminated. Soon after this he streamlined the typewriter and it became popular so rapidly that he quit evangelism and went into typewriters full-time. The Oliver Typewriter Company, for a while the biggest manufacturer of typewriters in the world, was bought by a British typewriter company that took on the Oliver brand.
The last Oliver typewriter was made in 1959. This makes Thompson’s Mr Oliver lamp at least 51 years old. Looking at it, though, one might not think so. Not a speck of grime sullies this sturdy machine and, besides a nick or two to give it charm, Mr Oliver looks as though it could produce an entire novel manuscript if it wanted to.
As for its new function, Mr Oliver operates as a perfectly functional, adequately bright desk lamp. Its only potential shortcoming is that it requires a rather spacious desk.
Thompson’s Typewriter Desk Lamp range is available directly from her Observatory studio. For more information visit the Recreate website: www.recreate.za.net