Flea Market Chic: Treasure Hunting for Stylish Homes

Bring texture, color and depth to your home and embrace sustainable living with vintage finds.

Flea-market finds are the perfect finishing touch to any interiors scheme. In modern rooms, a distressed chair or a vintage mirror bring much-needed character. And in traditional decorating schemes, faded textiles and mismatched china are all part of the charm. Of course, Flea Market Chic is about sustainable recycling, upcycling, and repurposing. But it’s also about a sense of history and place, about individuality, and creating a home that reflects your life and personality. Every piece has a story: the colourful jug you found at a car boot fair, the vintage telephone that belonged to a favourite aunt, the little chair you found in a village junk shop, or the old trashcans that have been converted into fashionable zinc planters. In Flea Market Chic, we’ll show you how to spot the clever find in a pile of junk, where to look and how to negotiate, how to smarten up (and when not to smarten up) second-hand items, and how to reuse things you already have.

Liz Bauwens is a stylist who has worked for House & Garden, Good Housekeeping and Country Homes and Interiors. She is also the founder of online homeware shop Otto Trading. Alexandra Campbell’s work has appeared in The Times Magazine, Good Housekeeping, Ideal Home, and The Daily Telegraph. She runs The Middle-Sized Garden, one of the UK’s leading YouTube channels on ornamental gardening and garden design, and her accompanying blog has been featured in Vuelio’s list of the Top 10 UK Garden blogs. Together they are the authors of books including Simply Country and Thrifty Chic, both available from CICO Books. Liz is based in London, UK and Alexandra is based in Kent, UK.