While apartment-hunting last week, I was taken to a show flat in a building in Happy Valley. The property agent warned me – the décor is a bit old school, so you can just ignore the furnishings and look at the space. Clearly, he thought of us as yuppies who want to live in uber-modern minimalist spaces. The truth, of course, is that we are pack rats who would ruin the definition of minimalism before half our boxes were unpacked. Case in point: I was far from impressed by the apartment, but I was two steps away from absconding with the antique telephone that sat on the side table. Though the agent beseeched “it doesn’t even work,” his tactics failed. I don’t have a home telephone line anyway, so the phone would purely exist for ornamental purposes, aka become good-looking trash.

Since I left my thieving days back in the drug store aisles at high school, my only recourse was to hit up Etsy, where all manner of antique telephones exist, from ornate gold dialers to clunky plastic affairs to proper pay phone models. My iPhone, for all its wonderful technological functions, now seems so dull.

If you're interested in old telephones, just look up "telephone" under the vintage tag at Etsy, there's a humongous selection at varying prices. The one at the bottom, incidentally, is exactly the phone I (along with all my other inmates) had in boarding school.






Images: Etsy