moulding search

[www.thegallery.us]

Anyone recognize this moulding?

[Not your average framer]

Mouldings of similar styles to that were popular in the 1970's and the 1980's for companies who supplied framed artworks to large hotels and places like that. They were produced by specialist manufacturers who catered specifically for that particular market sector. There was a big boom in building new hotel complexies at one time, but probably less so in mordern times. Also moulding styles change with the fashions of the era, so obtaining supplies of the same type of moulding is not likely to be easy. Added to that many of such moulding were only sold in box quantities as this was not pracical for the manufacturers to supply mouldings in smaller quantities.

From time to time, I get asked to produce replicas of older frames and this is usually where a family has an old family photo from years ago and they want frame a much more up to date family photo in a similar frame to make a reasonably similar match pair of frames. This hardly happens at all in these days, but at one time it was more common, but never hugely common. I mostly used to slice up pieces of other moulding and stacked them together as one complete profile, but some mouldings are just impossible to produce a replica of, I think that this is almost certainly one of these impossible mouldings.

The range of companies, which still produce moulding for hotels and conference centres was always a limited number of companies and finding out who they are won't be easy. I suspect that two of these in the U'K. would possibly have been Eco Mouldings and perhaps International art supplies, but this is perhaps largely guessing.