Before Rattanology

Two founders. Two little boys. A decade of looking.

It started at car boot sales.

Bill and Nory Mae Parry rose early. They loaded Jacob and Drew into the pram and went to work — auction houses, antique fairs, car boots across the UK. The boys slept. Their parents looked.

That was Mid Century & Co. Founded in July 2010. Ten years of it. G-Plan. Danish modernism. Swedish craft. The great Italian natural material designers — Vivai del Sud. The Americans — McGuire. Sideboards, lighting, rattan, bamboo. Pieces built to last. Designed to be lived with, not displayed.

Some were already gems. Others were future gems — pieces the market had not yet remembered to value. Bill and Nory Mae knew the difference.

The sideboard that started a conversation. Rattan woven tight as argument.

Rattan kept appearing. Not as a trend. As a material. Warm without softness. Structural without weight. It held light in a way other materials did not. It aged honestly. The McGuire chairs. The Dal Vera sideboard. A quiet authority that cannot be manufactured.

Vivai del Sud pencil reed botanical relief screen — Mid Century & Co collection

Pencil reed pulled into relief. Nature made architectural.

Chippendale rattan living room set — whitewashed fretwork frames with linen cushions, Mid Century & Co

Fretwork as language. The room listening.

Paul Frankl pretzel rattan sofa and armchair set — arched rattan frame with circular detail, Mid Century & Co

Paul Frankl. The pretzel Style. Rattan bent into argument.

McGuire rattan sofa set — Mid Century & Co collection

McGuire. California, 1948. Rattan as rigour.

McGuire flip flap rattan table — rare Mid Century & Co find

The table that folds. The idea that doesn’t.

Thonet bentwood cane coat rack — Mid Century & Co collection

Thonet. Bentwood. Steam and pressure. The original flex.

Set of four oak dining chairs with arched cane backs and upholstered seats — Mid Century & Co

The hoop. Iron legs, brass feet. A circle that holds.

Set of four Habitat beech folding chairs with woven cane seats — Terence Conran, Mid Century & Co

Habitat, Terence Conran. The democratic chair. Beech and cane — nothing wasted.

Set of six Thonet bentwood café armchairs — Mid Century & Co

French. Faux bamboo. The imitation that became the original.

Italian rattan hoop lounge chair on black iron legs with brass feet — Mid Century & Co

Thonet, Six of them. The café that never closes.

Set of six Lane Furniture walnut and cane back armchairs with suede seats — Mid Century & Co

Lane Furniture, Virginia. Six chairs. Walnut, cane, suede — American craft at its most considered.

Dal Vera rattan sideboard designed by Flam Sansoni — woven rattan panels, rattan pole edging and tarnished brass handles, Mid Century & Co

Dal Vera. Flam Sansoni. Rattan as precision.

Among the pieces that influenced our love for rattan and passed through our hands, a Dal Vera sideboard was one that never stayed. Designed by Flam Sansoni — who created the rattan collection for the Italian studio Dal Vera — it treated rattan not as a rustic material but as a medium for precision. Woven rattan panels, rattan pole edging, brass handles tarnished with time — it was structured, considered, and quietly authoritative. It asked nothing of the room. It simply belonged.

Italian. Unknown master. The suite that got away.

Not every piece came with a name. This Italian dressing table — split bamboo veneer, bamboo pole frame, brass cap feet — arrived without attribution. The designer remains unknown. It did not matter. The work spoke clearly enough.

Eleven drawers. A suite behind it: matching night stands, a bed, a wardrobe. The seller had them all. Bill and Nory Mae took the dressing table. The rest went elsewhere.

Some pieces teach you about a maker. This one taught them about a tradition — a generation of Italian craftspeople in the 1970s who understood bamboo not as decoration but as structure. Precise. Considered. Built to outlast the decade that made it.

The master’s name is still unknown. The standard is not.

Then 2020. The world stopped.

The question that had been forming since 2010 — through every auction room, every early morning, every car boot with the pram — became impossible to ignore. What if, instead of finding other people’s beautiful things, they made their own?

The Philippines. Generations of master rattan and bamboo craftspeople. A tradition older than the mid-century designers they had spent a decade admiring. The pandemic did not create the decision. It clarified it.

Rattanology.com was registered in 2020. Mid Century & Co — July 2010 to 2020 — had done its work.

A UK design studio, rooted in Oxford. Working directly with master craftspeople in the Philippines. Rattan lighting and furniture that belongs in the same conversation as the pieces they once hunted.

Not sourced. Designed. Made. Theirs.

Jacob and Drew are older now. They know what a McGuire chair is. The eye was always there — it just needed somewhere to go.