{"title":"Archived","description":"\u003cp\u003ePieces that have passed through. Kept here for record.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"octagonal-side-table-gillows-london","title":"Octagonal Side Table, Waring \u0026 Gillow","description":"\u003cp\u003eA compact interwar side table built on proportion rather than ornament. The fluted sides, open shelves and octagonal top give it the kind of quiet geometry the Gillow workshops handled well: useful furniture with just enough ceremony.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe brass plate names it exactly: guaranteed manufactured at the Lancaster factory, Waring \u0026amp; Gillow (1932) Ltd. Gillows of Lancaster was one of England's great cabinetmakers, and by this date the name was carried by Waring \u0026amp; Gillow, formed when the Lancaster house merged into the larger company. The \"(1932)\" marks the reconstituted company of that year, which dates the table neatly to the 1930s; the plate's own \"established 1695\" is the firm's heritage claim rather than a date for this piece. Old name, later chapter, same standard of build. The top has been refinished by KOBK; the rest is left as it came.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"KILL OR BE KILLED","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43248753311857,"sku":"KOBK.26.FUR.001","price":1295.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0666\/5800\/9201\/files\/gillows_resize.jpg?v=1784263638"},{"product_id":"planet-lamp-mustard","title":"Planet Lamp, Mustard","description":"\u003cp\u003eA proper working lamp from one of the most recognised names in Australian mid-century lighting.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003ePlanet Lighting began as a Melbourne sideline of the Iggulden family's Bentley Manufacturing in the early 1900s, and from the late 1930s on, Bill Iggulden was building self-balancing task lamps that had no real local equivalent. His Orbit came first, the long-running I-series followed in 1938, and the Studio K of 1962 went on to be shown at the Louvre and MoMA, one of the very few pieces of truly original Australian industrial design to travel that far. The naming was deliberate: Orbit, Planet, the cosmic vocabulary of small mechanical solar systems for a desk.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe engineering is the heart of it. A sprung, counterweighted arm that holds whatever angle you leave it at, a focused cone at the end of it, and a body built to be moved a thousand times without going slack. It is a tool first, which is exactly what gives it its presence as an object on a desk now.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe mustard finish is the period detail that lifts it out of pure utility. Mid-century Australian homes liked their working pieces to carry colour: enamels on radios, telephones, kettles, and lamps that would otherwise have stayed industrial. Serviced and rewired so it works as it was built to, with a new switch fitted. It still reads as a tool first and a collectible second. That is why it works.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"KILL OR BE KILLED","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43248753344625,"sku":"KOBK.26.LGT.001","price":425.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0666\/5800\/9201\/files\/download_ef3549d0-c4c7-41ba-a576-b02583ff0b4b.jpg?v=1779843911"},{"product_id":"heritage-bedside-cabinet-fred-ward-for-myer","title":"Heritage Bedside Cabinet, Myer","description":"\u003cp\u003eA compact Australian cabinet with the kind of finish that makes small furniture memorable. The arched niche, waterfall drawers and figured veneer give it more presence than its footprint should allow.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt is a Myer Heritage piece, identified by its maker's plate. Heritage was Myer's postwar furniture line, part of the broader story of Australian retail modernism, when a department store could put well-made, quietly modern furniture into ordinary homes. The range is often associated with the designer Fred Ward, who worked in that world, but we are not able to confirm that he designed this particular cabinet, so we credit it to the Heritage range rather than to a name. Either way it feels domestic in the best sense: thoughtful, handsome, and made to earn its place.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"KILL OR BE KILLED","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43248756883569,"sku":"KOBK.26.FUR.004","price":595.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0666\/5800\/9201\/files\/fred_ware_02.jpg?v=1782728665"},{"product_id":"fossil-fish-fragment-probably-koonwarra","title":"Fossil Fish Fragment","description":"\u003cp\u003eA fish held in the middle of disappearing. The strongest comparison is the famous fossil fish of Koonwarra, in South Gippsland, where an Early Cretaceous lake bed, around 115 million years old, preserved small fish, insects, plants and even feathers in fine mudstone. At that time this part of Australia sat close to the South Pole, and the still, cold lake floor buried things gently enough to keep extraordinary detail. The fish there typically run 10 to 30 cm and survive as delicate brown traces in pale stone, which is exactly what this fragment looks like.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Koonwarra attribution stays \"probably\", on the strength of the look and the regional museum provenance rather than a firm record. Not a complete specimen, but that is part of the appeal: less a perfect fish than a surviving record of burial, pressure and very deep time.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"KILL OR BE KILLED","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43248760782961,"sku":"KOBK.26.NAT.006","price":145.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0666\/5800\/9201\/files\/h08.jpg?v=1781597428"},{"product_id":"mid-century-japanese-iwatsu-hineri-handkerchief-vase","title":"Mid-Century Japanese Iwatsu Hineri Handkerchief Vase","description":"\u003cp\u003eA small handkerchief vase with the lip pulled up into soft folds and the blue pushed deepest at the base. It has that very good mid-century glass trick of looking fluid and cut at the same time. Casing means a layer of coloured glass sealed inside clear, which is what gives the colour that submerged, lensed depth.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIwatsu Glass of Osaka made some of Japan's most recognised mid-century glass, and Hineri was their export line, ribbed, tactile and built to catch the light. It is good enough that it is regularly mistaken for Murano, but it does not need the borrowed glamour. Heavy enough to feel convincing, bright enough to hold its own, and exactly the right size for a shelf, a sill, or a single stem.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"KILL OR BE KILLED","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43248762126449,"sku":"KOBK.26.OBJ.023","price":135.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0666\/5800\/9201\/files\/download_c697714e-bd12-4c3f-a89e-24ef43b4691f.jpg?v=1779841664"},{"product_id":"art-deco-beswick-blue-glaze-jug","title":"Art Deco Beswick Blue-Glaze Jug","description":"\u003cp\u003eA jug with one foot in the kitchen and the other in modernism. The body is compact and rounded, lifted on three small feet, then finished with an angled rim that gives the whole thing its snap. The pale blue glaze keeps it from feeling severe: soft enough to stay domestic, sharp enough to read as design.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eBeswick is better known now for figurines, but the firm made a great deal of ornamental and useful ware alongside them, and this sits in that good middle ground. Useful, sculptural, and a little smarter than it needs to be.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"KILL OR BE KILLED","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43248762191985,"sku":"KOBK.26.OBJ.026","price":95.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0666\/5800\/9201\/files\/KOBK.26.OBJ.026-01.jpg?v=1784263519"},{"product_id":"painted-tin-gymnasium-trade-sign-india","title":"Painted Tin Gymnasium Trade Sign, India","description":"\u003cp\u003eA trade sign first, but only just. The bodybuilder is all bent knees, chest and dumbbells. India kept hand-painted sign culture alive as a real working language long after most places had given it up, and the cracked paint and direct linework here belong to that world: signs painted by hand, hung outside, weathered, repainted.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt also sits close to India's older strength culture, the akharas and taleems, the wrestling halls and gym rooms where the body was trained in public and became its own kind of advertisement. Uncommon enough that it does not need a perfect comparison. It already has what it needs.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"KILL OR BE KILLED","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43248763895921,"sku":"KOBK.26.OBJ.045","price":275.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0666\/5800\/9201\/files\/download_06c34a10-1874-4bae-9069-53c66a1d41e6.jpg?v=1779841252"},{"product_id":"artist-unknown-colour-test","title":"Artist Unknown, Colour Test","description":"\u003cp\u003eA restrained work on paper built from stacked bands of colour that reads as both experiment and resolution. The title we have given it is honest: it has the feel of a colour study, an artist testing how tones sit against each other, and yet it holds together as a finished picture in a way most studies never manage.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThat tension is the appeal. Anonymous works get judged harshly, valued as decor rather than as art, but the hand here is far stronger than the auction estimate suggested. The banded structure puts it loosely in the colour-field conversation that ran through the middle of the century, where the subject of a painting became colour itself and the relationships between fields of it. On estate provenance and the original frame, it appears to date from around 1970 to 1980. Reframed by KOBK in Australian hardwood, otherwise left alone.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"KILL OR BE KILLED","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43248763961457,"sku":"KOBK.26.ART.002","price":325.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0666\/5800\/9201\/files\/h07.jpg?v=1781597429"},{"product_id":"vintage-tapa","title":"Vintage Tapa","description":"\u003cp\u003eA barkcloth panel with the kind of age that makes a surface better rather than weaker. The repeating red-brown geometry sits comfortably within the wider tapa world, where cloth is made not woven: inner bark is stripped, soaked and beaten out into a broad sheet, then worked with pigment and pattern.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eTapa is not decorative fabric. Across the Pacific it carries social, ceremonial and regional meaning that varies sharply from island to island, used in everything from clothing and bedding to gifts, rank and ritual exchange. Treating it as art on a wall is a translation, and we want to be honest that it is one. This piece came to us by a specific route, gifted to a ministering missionary and later held in a personal collection, which is part of how objects like this travelled out of their origin and into other lives. Mounted and framed by KOBK in Australian hardwood, and held with care.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"KILL OR BE KILLED","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43248764092529,"sku":"KOBK.26.ART.006","price":525.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0666\/5800\/9201\/files\/KOBK.26.ART.006-01.jpg?v=1782725645"},{"product_id":"set-of-four-embossed-leather-dining-chairs-decro-melbourne","title":"Set of Four Embossed Leather Dining Chairs, Decro, Melbourne","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn the middle of the last century a factory in Coburg was turning out Spanish Renaissance fantasies for Melbourne dining rooms. Decro Pty Ltd worked both sides of the ledger, modernist one week and historicist the next, and its furniture later found its way into the Senate and Prime Minister's suites. These four chairs are the historicist side at full stretch, with tooled leather backs with a deep-embossed rosette, a punchwork border of small flowers, rows of hammered studs, and a pierced front stretcher carved like strapwork off a galleon.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEach back was embossed by hand, so no two rosettes sit quite alike, and the leather has burnished to a colour somewhere between saddle and cedar. They wear their years without apology. One chair has lost a small carved tip from the crest, so long ago and so quietly that you have to be shown where to look; another carries a patch worn clean through the leather, left exactly as it is and pictured in full. Past those two honest marks the set is remarkably even. The four also split into two pairs, two with a plain straight stretcher between the legs and two with a shaped, scalloped one. The likeliest reading is that the set brings together two near-identical Decro variants, but we would rather note the difference than insist on a reason. The timber and the leather have been cleaned and fed by hand, the seats left as they came, and all four stand firm and sit sound. Chairs made in Coburg pretending to be Toledo, and better for the pretence.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"KILL OR BE KILLED","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43622362185841,"sku":"KOBK.26.FUR.012","price":1195.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0666\/5800\/9201\/files\/KOBK.26.FUR.012-01.jpg?v=1783502503"},{"product_id":"yaesu-world-time-clock-japan","title":"Yaesu World Time Clock, Japan","description":"\u003cp\u003eYaesu built radios, not clocks. The Tokyo firm has equipped amateur radio operators since the 1950s, and this clock existed for one reason. When you are talking to the world, you need to know what time the world thinks it is. The city ring carries every zone from Greenwich to Auckland, the inner ring splits the day into light and dark, and the orange DATE LINE marker sits exactly where yesterday becomes tomorrow. It sat beside transceivers through decades of late-night contacts.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSomeone punched the name TILSON onto red tape and pressed it to the back, the way you label a thing you expect to see again. The battery movement runs on a fresh cell, keeping honest time the way it always has. Wire stand for the desk, keyhole for the wall. Made in Japan, marked so on the dial.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"KILL OR BE KILLED","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43622373818481,"sku":"KOBK.26.OBJ.101","price":190.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0666\/5800\/9201\/files\/KOBK.26.OBJ.101-hero.jpg?v=1783555647"},{"product_id":"hanging-steel-shark-reclaimed-drum-metal","title":"Hanging Steel Shark, Reclaimed-Drum Metal","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cimg\u003e\u003cimg\u003e\u003cimg\u003e\u003cimg\u003eThere is a whole cottage craft, strongest in India and across the East, of cutting up old metal drums and beating them into fish to hang on a length of chain. This is one of those, worked into a proper shark and bigger than most at 86 cm: a sheet-steel body welded closed along the belly, the flanks hammered round, the fins cut and riveted on, the tail welded, two rings set into the spine for the chains.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIt has aged the slow way into something with real presence, a dark oiled finish worn back to bare steel, honest rust at the edges, and the ghost of the donor metal's old printing rising through the paint. A resourceful, hand-made thing, all the better for the decades behind it.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"KILL OR BE KILLED","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":43683466772593,"sku":"KOBK.26.OBJ.120","price":275.0,"currency_code":"AUD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0666\/5800\/9201\/files\/tinshark02PSEdit.jpg?v=1784708595"}],"url":"https:\/\/kobk.online\/collections\/archived.oembed","provider":"KILL OR BE KILLED","version":"1.0","type":"link"}