DO YOU remember Mary Ellen on The Waltons, all wholesome teeth and temptation, checked frock and “Goodnight Jim-Bob, goodnight John Boy”. You do? Well, imagine her grown up and wearing Prada and you’ve got Lorraine Johnson, an American on the loose in London and starring in her own restoration drama.
In her designer frock and L. K. Bennett shoes, Johnson is probably the least likely person you could imagine would go rummaging in skips. Yet this energetic blonde is a regular sight in the better-heeled areas of the city as she truffles for discarded bits of furniture to strip, paint and recycle. “Sometimes builders shout at me and go ‘Oi, hoppit’, but I just hate waste,” says the fortysomething self-confessed junk addict and author of How to Restore & Repair Practically Everything.
“Look at that little table,” she says, as we sit in her spacious living room. She points to a dainty cherrywood piece with three legs and a circular top. “I found that sticking out of a skip in Chelsea as I was leaving a restaurant one night. My friends were mortified with embarrassment, but I am a zealot about recycling. Why should something nice be chucked out because people can’t be fagged to give it some attention?” Johnson is originally from Ohio, but came to London in the early 1970s when we were all abandoning our Victorian bits and pieces in favour of G-Plan and worse. “I wanted to furnish my flat, but there wasn’t anything affordable. Then I noticed some lovely things dumped in skips or outside houses, so I rescued them and did them up. They were really solid pieces and I still have some of them.”
Johnson’s waste-not-want-not ethic is, she says, inherited from her great-grandfather, who owned a hardware store in the rural Midwest. As a child, she was fascinated by the nuts and bolts, the smell of hardware and solvents, and the notion that nothing should be thrown away.
Her splendid house in a leafy South London square is dotted with her finds: a pretty Welsh milking stool sits in the hearth (“I think I gave a couple of quid for that”); there are mosaic tables on the deck (“I did the tops myself from bits of old broken china”), and the big fat sofas, re-covered several times, are now so glaringly bright that you feel nervous about sitting on them. “Don’t worry”, says Johnson, “it’s only white denim. It goes in a very hot wash and comes out spotless.”
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Johnson, who also has a job as a successful garden designer, has hands that are testament to her hard work. She looks at them quickly, tries to pick off a bit of old paint, then shudders and tucks them firmly beneath her. “I’m not the kind of person who can flop on the sofa all day reading a magazine. I have to do stuff — strip, sand, paint, plant things, anything to be occupied, and I never watch TV.”
She has a workroom in the basement, where several works are in progress, and there is a pleasing aroma of thinners down there, but when she paints large pieces of furniture she does so on the lawn in sunny weather. “That way, when paint gets on the grass, you just mow it off.” The house is surprisingly tidy, with no evidence of those shambolic hobby corners and unfinished projects that you see in many homes. She says: “I like order, but the attic is another matter. You should see it. No, perhaps you shouldn’t.”
Her book, which covers everything from repairing a wobbly chair to restringing pearls and making new things look old, is well researched. It has tips on getting out wine stains (with Perrier, would you believe?) and has chapters on repairing wood, raffia, glass, leather and china, among others, although faced with a ginger jar broken into 28 pieces I think I might be tempted to put the whole lot in the bin. Johnson admits that “some people can’t be fagged to repair things ” but it’s clear she isn’t one of them.
So has she had any disasters? “I’ve screwed up a few times with special paint effects — it’s very difficult to get them exactly right.” If a piece is potentially valuable, such as a Victorian bedside table with a Japanese painted design, then she does farm it out to someone with more experience, although she has been at this for nearly 25 years.
In an ideal world, she would like to open her own Junk Depot, so that people bored with their sofas, beds and tables could bring them along and trade them in for something different. “It would be great if, instead of taking anything tatty to the dump, we could do it up and sell it on. Think of all the trees that would save in a year.”
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Her book was published 20 years ago but is being reissued next month. Back by popular demand, you might say. On its first outing, it had rave reviews and even impressed the good people of that marvellous organ Woodworking Crafts, where it was acclaimed as “something that has a place in most practical homes”.
A quick, and some might say mischievous, peep at the Waltons website (www.the-waltons.com), shows that Marion Hamner Hawkes, who inspired the character of Mary Ellen, likes nothing more than to paint as a form of recreation.
Now who’d have thought it?