It was once called the poor man’s silver. Now, it has found its way into the echelons of haute home décor.
Pewter is no longer a cheap metal reserved for gift store trinkets. The material — an alloy of tin, copper and other trace metals — has earned renown among celebrated interior designers and become a darling of home design boutiques that influence the look of American households at the highest levels, with many pieces priced in the thousands.
While Gilded Age barons used more precious materials like silver and fine porcelain for formal social engagements, today’s wealthiest class “entertains in a more relaxed environment” and appreciates pewter for its everyday functionality, said Ken Fulk, an interior designer.
With finishes ranging from satin to matte, pewter is regarded for its subtlety and requires less daily upkeep than even-pricier silver, which typically has a high-shine surface that requires constant hand polishing. Pewter, by contrast, can even be washed on select dishwasher cycles, making it better suited to today’s more casual lifestyles.
It’s why Mr. Fulk, who is primarily based in San Francisco, has outfitted grand homes with pewter tableware and décor in locations as disparate as Miami, London and the South of France.
“It’s sturdy but still incredibly chic, it has an understated elegance,” he said. “It works for people who want to live graciously but not in an old-world way that is too stuffy or delicate.”
That kind of everyday refinement is what has driven a surge in pewter sales at Nickey Kehoe, a luxe home goods emporium with locations in New York City and Los Angeles. Todd Nickey, a co-founder of the store, said the company began selling some items in pewter, what he described as a “magical, durable material,” some dozen years ago without great fanfare.
But in the past three years, sales of pewter items — including $400-plus cocktail mixers and oil lamps by Match, made in Brescia, Italy, as well as $400 pitchers by a lesser-known Italian maker and $650 vintage tureens — have quadrupled, Mr. Nickey said.
Until the 1970s, pewter contained notable amounts of lead as part of its alloy recipe. Mr. Nickey said that many of today’s applications of pewter — now lead-free — are “more elegant” compared with historic designs.
While pewterware was once known mostly for having primitive shapes, today’s luxury pieces range from sleek and modernist to sweet heirlooms. An oversize candle sconce by the label Appelgren ($1,440) is a version of those the company once made for Swedish royalty, while Simone Fanciullacci’s wine bucket design released this year with dealers like the Italian design marketplace Artemest ($6,220) has clean, contemporary lines.
In Chicago, the artist Christopher Gentner uses pewter to craft showpiece-quality coffee tables and benches that are sold on the star interior designer Kelly Wearstler’s website (priced around $14,000).
Over the course of months, pewter’s slightly pitted finish develops a faint patina that gives it a smoky, antique glow. At one point, high-end collectors may have dismissed the look as grimy, but today it’s “widely accepted as a nice thing to have,” said Alan Eckstein, co-founder of Somerset House, a design studio and antique showroom based in Long Island City, Queens.
Pewter items sold at Somerset House, like a vintage Christian Dior wine bucket ($850) and a Gunnar Havstad vase ($1,680), both exhibit that kind of patina, which, in Mr. Eckstein’s mind, lends them a “feeling of age and experience” that is highly desired by shoppers in today’s tech-driven society. Other design-driven antique stores are also selling pewter. Counter Space in Los Angeles, for instance, has a $950 English candelabra on its website.
This isn’t pewter’s first boom — its popularity has ebbed and flowed over the course of centuries. Its roots trace back to 14th-century Europe, said Ann Wagner, curator of decorative arts at Winterthur Museum in Delaware, and had an important place in British and colonial American history.
With the advent of easy-to-use glassware like Pyrex and industrially made ceramics, pewter lost much of its market viability and its status was relegated to that of an antiquated material, Ms. Wagner said.
But now its popularity is creeping back as many are on the lookout for household items that offer an insider appeal, much like a rare concert T-shirt or a pair of “it” pants.
Pewter fits that bill, according to Sheila Bouttier, the founder of Galerie Provenance — a high-end antiques and vintage homewares studio with locations in Bridgehampton, N.Y., and Los Angeles. The space has begun selling pewter pieces over the past few months, mostly of Swedish provenance. The prices range from $1,150, for a Svenskt Tenn vase, to $4,800, for a Nils Fougstedt-designed mirror set in a pewter frame.
“It’s an area of design that hasn’t been exposed as much,” Ms. Bouttier said of pewter. “People are searching the archives of design to find new things that appeal to them.”
Misty White Sidell is a Times reporter covering shopping and fashion trends.
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