• „I have a dream” – Martin Luther King.

„I have a dream” – Martin Luther King.

 First there was … a dream. A dream about a house in the hills, surrounded by forest, with a view of mist-covered meadowland. A dream of a house with old-wood porch, with walls made of red brick, and roof covered with century-old tiles. A dream about a house with a soul.

And that house was built. Later on, thanks to the experience acquired in building our home, we created a business – named Regalia Polska Manufaktura , where we make furniture and floors out of old timber, floor and wall tiles out of bricks, in addition to unique decor elements for the interior of your home.

Our home is a Warminian homestead that is more than 150 years old. When we bought the property in 2006, its condition could be honestly described as … a disintegrating ruin. We had no choice. The house had to be taken apart and rebuilt from ground up. And that is what we did. We built the house anew, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we “built it

once again”. This is because in constructing it we used all the bricks, beams, planks, roof tiles and stove tiles recovered during the dismantling. When we discovered that there was not enough material left from the dismantling to reconstruct the building, we turned to the “local construction material yard”, that is we bought such construction materials from local folks, as we found them discarded and forgotten somewhere in a corner of the local farmer’s yard. All those bricks, stones and boards had come from old residential houses, farm buildings, stables and granaries. For us, they proved to be a real treasure.

While constructing our home, we became apt at identifying the origin and quality of salvaged old bricks, roof tiles and wood. We also learned how to clean and preserve reclaimed materials. By the time we finished the construction and started finishing works, the idea of using old materials had become our philosophy. Floors made of bricks, wooden beams under the ceiling, old windows used as frames for mirrors, and furniture built out of 100-year-old pine. And thus emerged, in that unplanned, spontaneous and natural way, a completely new plan for life—our business that we call “Regalia” Polish Manufactory, in which we employ people from our rural municipality. Everything that is created here is made locally, by local craftsmen and with locally sourced materials.

 


We take care to…

We take care to maintain the character of an old-style manufactory in our operation, while providing our customers with high quality products through relationships that are never impersonal. The company’s name—since regalia are nothing else but royal insignia—is intended to suggest the superiority of quality and tradition over the mass-produced shoddiness and universal mediocrity. In fact, a manufactory (the word comes from Latin and means “something made by hand”) is a small production establishment, where the final product emerges through division of labour whereby an individual expert craftsman is responsible for completing each stage of the process. And it is so also in our business. We do just about everything ourselves –beginning with the design, through the sourcing of material, preparing it for the production process, and ending with the crafting of the final product, be it furniture or other kinds of finish elements, exterior or interior.


We dismantle old structures by hand. We do not use machinery because, after machines have done their work, wood is suitable only for burning and bricks and roof tiles are converted into debris. We recover materials only from buildings earmarked for demolition, that is from structures that cannot be saved for technical reasons or stand in the way of a future motorway. We consider unethical to dismantle buildings ina good condition only because they contain high quality building materials. Recycling of old materials must not be a result of plunder.

To use old materials in the construction of new homes and in the production of furniture represents not only a unique offer for the customer, but also reflects a concern for the protection of our natural environment. It is a barbarity to cut down forests to produce furniture from young wood, which cannot hold a candle to old wood as far as its quality is concerned, while at the same time high-quality old wood is designated for burning as fuel. According to the Global Trees Campaign, in the United Kingdom less than 10% of wood waste is recycled, but at least 3000 ton of demolition wood (on each business day!) is destroyed or burned (regrettably, no such data is available for Poland, but we fear that in our country the situation is even worse). Most of that wood could be re-used.

 


We guarantee nothing but…

1.   original materials – we use only old wood, we do not artificially age young wood because this would be at odds with our commitment to salvaging reclaimed materials. Where it is not possible to fit in old accessories, we make them ourselves (with the exception of internal hinges), usually out of reclaimed materials.

2.    Polish capital – we are a Polish manufacturer with exclusively Polish capital. We provide jobs to many Polish craftsmen.
3.    Polish product – we use traditional technologies and make our products in Poland with materials recovered mostly within the region of Warmia and Masuria.