Michael Mortimer Fire Surround

I’m delighted to have identified a wooden fire surround I bought secondhand about three years ago from eBay.

It was made by the talented miniaturist Michael Mortimer. [I added the blazing fire in the hearth.]

I bought it because I loved the realistic old oak grain effect of the wood and because I thought that, despite being a relatively modern miniature, it would suit my old German chalet very nicely.

I had no idea who had made it but knew it was very nicely made.

Curiously, at the time that I bought it, I posted a photo of the room I had placed it in on the Dolls’ Houses Past & Present website and a member commented: “Does the fireplace have a maker’s name - or gold squiggle on it? The smoothness and fake holes are ringing a bell in my fuzzy mind” to which I replied “No, no marks on the fireplace at all, sadly.”

And yet I just looked at the back and there are these marks!!

I can only think that I didn’t distinguish between these marks and the glue residue on it from where it must have previously been attached to a wall - maybe my contact lenses are better these days!

Well no matter, whatever the reason for my temporary blindness, I now know that the marks are those of Michael Mortimer because last week I was browsing eBay in a spare moment (as you do) and I spotted a lovely secondhand Welsh dresser with the same distinctive finish as my fire surround. The dresser was a signed piece by Michael Mortimer.

This led me to Google Michael Mortimer and eventually I discovered a very similar fire surround of his which had been for sale on the US site dollhousejunction.com.

Interestingly, most (if not all) of the photos of pieces of Michael Mortimer furniture that I found online had this comma type mark (the top mark in the photo above) with a heart underneath it, whereas mine has this intriguing wiggly L-shaped mark underneath. I wonder what, if anything, the two different marks denote. [**I now have more information on these marks from Michael himself - see my footnote below, added 2nd January, 2020.]

By the way, I’m posting this blog entry mainly to make sure that I remember this discovery as it’s pretty scary what information I seem to have discovered and then subsequently forgotten in the last few years - not to mention the makers’ marks I may or may not have noticed...!

Until next time,
Zoe 

(But do read on because there is almost as much added to this post below as there is on the post itself! 😀)

[Added 1st January, 2020: I discovered today that Michael has a shop on Etsy and that the pieces for sale there are signed with symbols more like those on my piece. He mentions too that since 1996, “every piece (mostly)” he has made has had a message attached to it, printed on paper and stuck to the back. The messages are things he made a note of if he: “heard something, read something, or just generally picked up on something that felt too important to overlook”. I think he might have only started selling miniatures about 1996*, so perhaps my message-less piece is one of his very earliest, from before he started to add them, though “most” suggests that some do go out without messages so it could be later, and of course, it might have had one which was subsequently lost or removed.

*The reason I think Michael might only just have started selling miniatures around 1996 is that, by sheer coincidence, I was reading an old issue of ‘Dolls House World’ from October 1996 yesterday and saw this enigmatic advert:

Although Michael’s business seems to be based in Checkendon in Oxfordshire these days and not Honiton in Devon, I’m assuming, because of the symbol used and the reference to 16thC style furniture, that this was his advert and, as you can see, it refers to the business having “begun”, presumably as in ‘just begun’***.]

[Added 2nd January, 2020: Following the discovery of Michael’s Etsy shop yesterday, I messaged the man himself to ask if he’d be kind enough to take a look at my blog post and let me know if the information I had gleaned was correct, and he was indeed kind enough! So, thank you to Micheal for letting me know that:

My fire surround is an older piece of his and, though he couldn’t remember exactly when it was made, he would guess that it was before 2000 because he has been adding a plaster moulding to the front of them (as seen on the one sold by dollhousejunction.com) for quite some time now.

**The squiggle on the back is his signature and the top bit represents a nine, not a comma as I had thought. The reason why he chose are nine? Well, he says it: “is a whole different story, and I’m not sure I can really explain that!”

**More recently, Michael has put a heart under the ’9’, but he has also changed this quite a few times over the years and still does - it doesn’t denote anything and is just him “seeing if something else feels better”.

He has been adding the messages, or phrases, for a long time too, but there have been periods when he has left them off.

***The advert from the October 1996 ‘Dolls House Word’ magazine (shown above) was placed just after Michael had moved from Sussex to Devon and changed his business name from ‘Michael Mortimer’ to ‘9’, hence the use of the words “has begun”. Michael said: “it felt like a new start”, but the new start was in name and place only as the furniture was the same that he’d been making since he started which was actually around 1991.

Michael moved from Devon to Oxfordshire in 2006.