Many of our customers across the United States and around the world are aware that "Mediterránia" recently celebrated its 30th anniversary in business. However, very few know the real story behind the origins of our company ... 

In the fall of 1993, I spent a great deal of time in Yecla, a small town in southeastern Spain's Murcia province, overseeing the production of contemporary furnishings for a luxury hotel in Mexico City that was owned by a French bank and managed by a Canadian hospitality firm ... suffice it to say that the whole project was the very definition of "convoluted". 

I lived in Barcelona at the time, and, Spanish roads and train service being what they were 32 years ago, there were many Fridays that I was just too tired to drive or train it 8-10 hours back home, so I would stay the weekend in a bare bones hostel in the village. 

The furnishings for the hotel project were manufactured by a company owned by 14 brothers and sisters whose father had been decorated by Generalissimo Francisco Franco himself as a "productive Spaniard". As the brothers were all avid bird hunters, many Sundays I would get some exercise by walking the fields outside the town with them. 

For the most part, Murcia was a poor agricultural region back then, and on those hikes through the countryside I noticed a number of adobe farmhouses that had been completely abandoned by "campesinos" who'd left for the provincial capital in search of employment. At one point I asked Juan, the oldest of the brothers, what became of all the gates, doors, columns and even furniture that had been left behind. He gave me a strange look and replied, "Well, what do you think they do with them? They either throw them out or they burn them!"

That was the precise moment in which the idea for "Mediterránia" was born ... I reasoned that if we could acquire Spanish country furniture and architectural elements at reasonable prices, we might very well have a market for them in the southwest of the United States.

Very shortly thereafter, one of my first friends and earliest mentors in the antiques trade, a retired dealer from Madrid who lived on the Costa Brava north of Barcelona, told me that you needed three things to be successful in the antiques business in Spain: (1) cash in hand to buy the pieces that you liked the moment that you saw them; (2) a network of contacts all around the country to help ferret out quality pieces; and (3) your own restoration operation. 

That last comment really surprised me. When I asked Miguel why, he explained, "By their very nature, restorers are some of the most bohemian creatures on earth. If the fish are biting up in the mountains or it's a nice day at the beach, I guarantee that they are not going to be restoring your pieces. Therefore, you need to have your own team of restorers, working 5 days a week in your own facility, to keep your business supplied. I've noticed that American buyers want fully restored antiques, not pieces in the raw the way that we find them as we travel through the provinces."

For multiple reasons, all good dealers in southern Europe prefer to source antiques completely unrestored: buying unrestored pieces in their "raw state" always ensures us of the best pricing; when dealing with unrestored antiques it is much easier to tell what, if anything, has been done previously to the piece; and we much prefer to do our own restoration rather than paying a premium to a third party when we know that our team will do a much better job anyway. Finally, and most importantly, despite being unrestored, all of us in the trade know what the intrinsic values of these period pieces are, and we act accordingly.

Whatever success Mediterránia has enjoyed over the past 30+ years is almost entirely due to the fact that we have had our own restoration shop and warehouse in Spain, and have been able to control our business at both ends of the supply chain.

For the first year of our business, our restoration shop was located in Yecla. We then moved our base of operations to the Costa Brava near the French border, an area that has always been a thriving antiques center ... and, as we now all know, where there are antiques, there are restorers.

TO BE CONTINUED ...