Focus/26 Conversations in Design: Extraordinary Interiors: An Eye for Architectural Salvage & Antiques with Drew Pritchard and Emily Tobin.

“I can’t tell you how proud I am of it being in The World of Interiors. It’s just the greatest.” Drew Pritchard – antique dealer and star of Salvage Hunters – has ticked off a lot of things on his CV, but having his recently restored Georgian home featured in his favourite magazine title is up there. The World of Interiors’ editor, Emily Tobin, marked the event with a Conversations in Design talk at Focus/26 on Design, which covered the house – a labour of love – TV, and a lifetime of collecting and curating.

Pritchard left school at 15 with no qualifications, “but I'd been buying and selling things since I was 11, and I was actually making enough money to survive,” he said. He was “saved” by a Youth Training Scheme as a trainee stained-glass conservator and designer, where he first came into contact with antique dealers, interior designers and restorers. “On the first day of my apprenticeship, a van pulled up at the workshops with ‘architectural antiques’ written down the side… it was full of stained-glass panels with all these butterflies flying all over the glass, and bits of fireplace sort of spilling around in the back of the van, and that was it. I was like, ‘I'm in. This is where I should be.’”

He says that his tastes are as eclectic as it gets – “I’m very equal opportunities, it doesn’t matter what age it is, as long as it feels right” – with instinct and experience coming together to govern what he buys. When something makes his “teeth itch”, then he knows it’s the one.

The house in Bath is almost an extension of his Tetbury showroom, with pieces coming and going: Pritchard reveals how, in the gap between sending a few snapshots to The World of Interiors and writer Ros Byam Shaw coming to see the place to interview him, “I’d sold it all and bought other things.”

He continued: “I’ve probably got about six or seven things I can’t bear parting with. Everything else has a price.” One of his pieces of advice to anyone starting out in his trade is “to remember it’s an antiques business. If you don’t make money, you can’t buy the next thing. You’ve got to keep the train rolling, otherwise you’re not going to learn.”

Pritchard recently left Salvage Hunters after 15 years on the show. “I had no intention of being on television,” he says, but he wanted to give an honest portrayal of the business as it was, a counterpoint to the cartoon version he saw being played out. “It just became a phenomenon. We were on in 62 countries, and at one point viewing figures were up to 22 million a day.” On the surface, the show might seem to be about objects, but to Pritchard, “I wanted it to be about people. Why do people collect? Why would they put that with that? That’s what fascinates me every day. I go to sleep thinking about it.”

Now, he’s on to a new chapter, or perhaps a return to the course he had marked out before TV caused a diversion. The Tetbury showroom opened at the end of 2025, and the Bath house has taken up enormous amounts of time and effort. “It took me eight years to find the right place, and the second I saw it, I loved it. It was utterly untouched, and in the most beautiful spot – but [its condition] was sort of appalling. I’d done restorations before, but this was beyond,” he said.

He set out to show that every single element that could go into a house could be salvaged, right down to the screws in the door locks, and incredibly, he achieved it. “I proved a point, but it does take an awful lot longer. You save so much on the material cost, but you lose a lot more in labour,” he said.

Pritchard goes back to the idea of objects really being about the people who made them, and the people who subsequently become their custodians. “I think certain things have a soul, whether they are 30 or 300 years old. When people make something they imbue it with themselves, and then it ages, and the ageing sort of soaks into it. I’m looking for that, and when you spot it, it’s a magical, magical thing. It still excites me.”

An Eye for Architectural Salvage & Antiques Talk sponsored by The World of Interiors.

TALK Theatre for Focus/26 on Design sponsored by Hector Finch Lighting.