Vancouver Architectural Antiques Ltd is having a closing down sale with prices slashed by 25%-50%. The company has stock across the range with an emphasis on lighting. It also has a large showing on 1stdibs.
 
Started as a hobby by Eric Cohen, a graduate of Algonquin College School of Business, by 1973 he had three garagefuls of antiques and salvage. Then he partnered with Jim McKeown of Ottawa and opened Century Antiques looking for unusual pieces and even turning up Tiffany stained glass and an Emile Gallé table, as well as starting on the road to bigger architectural pieces.
 
In 1981 Eric started Cohen's Architectural Salvage in Merivale Road, Ottawa and a few year's later bought the 18,000 square feet former convent at Richmond Lodge for $317,000, refitting it and moving the business there in 1985.
 
Cohen, then 37, told The Ottawa Citizen, "The building had been neglected and vandalized over the years and a fire in 1979 destroyed many of the inner walls. It was not only physically hard work, it was also hard emotionally. You never realize how much work there really is to do until you get in and actually start."
 
That did not seem stop his building spirit, and by 1989 he was looking at buying the former St Louis hotel in York Street but by 1994 he announced that a crumbling heritage market had sent him west and he started again, this time in Main Street, Vancouver.
 
"Vancouver has turned out to be the right place at the right time. "The East is badly beaten by the recession," Eric told Anne Garber of The Province in 1995. "It's hard to buy, it's hard to sell, it's hard to do anything. Anywhere in North America you go, it's dead. Vancouver is the only place where there's any action. And Vancouverites are sophisticated. They know what they want. The Lower Mainland has many arts and crafts and art deco structures, so people have learned to appreciate those styles. They really know their architecture."
 
In 1997 he bought two monstrous marble mantels from a London mansion described as in Renaissance-Greco-Roman-revival in Carrara marble. One of them took three days to assemble from its 16 wooden crates. The other, with one Greek female caryatid lying calmly in state in a coffin of wood chips, was still in boxes. A wealthy American eccentric, very much like some latter-day Charles Foster Kane, had scooped up crates of the stuff and had it shipped to New York, then Philadelphia. Somehow it ended up in Victoria. The fireplaces belonged to a family trust whose terms demanded anonymity. Equally mysterious provisos stated that it be sold in Canada and not by auction.
 
In 1999 John Mackie of The Vancouver Sun wrote:

As a high-end antique dealer, Eric Cohen goes to great lengths to find quality material. Three times a year, he leaves his Vancouver store, Architectural Antiques, to fly back east on buying trips. On his last trip, he put 6,500 kilometers on a big cube van, hitting 30 American cities between Detroit and Chicago along with countless towns and several Canadian cities.
He comes back with some amazing items. Hanging from the ceiling at Architectural Antiques is a brilliant green Baccarat crystal chandelier. It's Persian, probably made in 1880, and costs a cool $75,000. "I was told it came from the Shah," he confides.
A quartet of stunning 19th-century stained glass windows representing a medieval call to arms were culled from a private school in England, and can be had for $25,000. An enormous 1911 cast iron bath tub with porcelain finish originated in the mansion of the first governor of the Bank of Canada, and recently sold for $5,000.
Exotic items all. But his greatest score was a pair of fireplace mantels he bought in Victoria and sold for $125,000 US, each.
As you might guess, they were very, very special pieces - the best in the world, circa 1848. Built for banker Lionel Rothschild's London mansion, the massive (seven feet high by 10 feet wide) mantels are cut from white "Michelangelo" Carrara marble and feature elaborately sculpted details of the sun god Apollo, the Rothschild arms and caryatids.
Besides being the height of 19th-century craftsmanship, they have historic significance: they were situated in the room where Rothschild and British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli struck the deal that gave Britain the money to buy the Suez Canal in 1875.
In 1959, the Rothschild mansion was torn down when the road was widened around Hyde Park Corner. The mantels were salvaged and journeyed to New York and Philadelphia before coming to Victoria, where they were to be installed in a chateau. But the owner dies and they lay in storage for several years.
"The trust company was sort of at a loss," explains Cohen. "They had these two big marble fireplaces in 60- or 70- odd crates, and they weren't even sure how to fit them together."
As luck would have it, someone from the trust company spotted Cohen's store when he was taking the bus up Main Street. Cohen bought the mantels and set one up in the store - but it didn't sell.
"They were here for 18 months, almost two years, and I was starting to get really worried," he ways. "We had two or three parties who were very, very interested but, at the end, it sort of petered out. I thought I'd made a massive error... I had considerable, considerable money into them."
He decided to advertise the mantels in the Maine Antique Digest, one of the premier journals of the antiques trade.
Unbeknown to him, an Internet edition comes out 10 days before the paper edition, and the day it hit the Net, he had an anxious phone call.
"I came in and someone said "This lady's been calling from England two or three times about fireplaces," he recalls.
"The phone rings, and it's a Mrs. B. 'I'm calling about your fireplaces.' 'Which ones?' 'The Rothschild ones.' 'How did you know about those?' 'It's on the Internet.'
"She said, 'Can you put them on hold for me?' I said, 'You want to put them on hold and you're in London?'
"She said, 'Well, my designer's on the way back to New York right now, he's in the jet. I'm going to call him, redirect the jet, and he'll give you a call.'
"This is first thing in the morning, about 10 o'clock. So I get a call from this man and he says, 'I'll be in Vancouver at 3:30 in the afternoon.' At 3:30 this guy comes in. He examines them very carefully, looks at them with a magnifying glass. I show him all the documentation, I show him photographs of them sitting in the Rothschild mansion.
"He looks at it and says, 'We'll have it.' I hadn't even advertised two. We had the other one in crates. He said, 'What's this?' I said, 'Well, we have two of them.' He said, 'Can we put it together? 'I said, 'It'll take me a few days,' and explained the second one was missing a few pieces. He said, 'Put the second one together and I'll come back.' So he flew home, we put the second one together, he flew back a week later, he looked at it and bought it."
Ironically, the mantels wound up being sent back to London, about two blocks from where the Rothschild mansion stood.
Cohen never did find out the buyer's name, but he later learned that the designer, Carlton Hobbs, is an antique dealer who doubles as a decorator to an elite clientele, including stars like Elton John, Mick jagger, and Madonna.
There's one more twist to the story. After the mantels were sold, Cohen and his wife Judith decided to take a vacation, leaving the store in the hands of their long-time assistant Robert McNutt.
"We're in Sedona Arizona and Robert gets a call from one of the Rothschilds. 'We understand you have my great-grandfather's fireplaces from Piccadilly. We want them.' Robert said, 'They're sold.'
"He said, 'we'll give you £100,000 if you can get them.' That's $250,000. So Robert called me, and I made a call to this guy in London, and he said, 'Forget it. This lady wouldn't sell them for the world.'"
The Rothschild mantels are the highlight of Cohen's 25 years as an antiques dealer.

This August Eric Cohen was listed as one of a number of donors to a salvage sale held to raise funds for the Heritage Vancouver Society, an organisation with which he has had a connection for a number of years.
 
Vancouver Architectural Antiques, 2403 Main Street, Vancouver BC V5T 3E1. Tel 604 872 3131.