A quirky shop upcycles old furniture and produces new items with an authentic feel. Sarah Millington meets its owner

SYLVIA Goodfellow remembers clearly her first upcycling project. It was a mahogany coat stand. She’d bought it on a whim, but after getting it home decided she hated it. As it wasn’t expensive – and as she’d always been artistic – Sylvia thought she’d give it a coat of paint. It marked a turning point. Though she didn’t realise it then, the modest makeover planted the seed of her business.

“I stood back and looked at it and thought, ‘I’ve transformed it into something I actually like’,” recalls Sylvia. “I can’t remember what I used. After that, anything that didn’t move basically got painted.”

Fast forward a few decades and Sylvia now owns Penny Pieces, a quaint and quirky shop just off the main road through Ponteland, a few minutes from Newcastle and a close neighbour of the airport. It’s one of those places that seems to draw you in – slightly ramshackle and crammed with individual, one-off pieces.

An official stockist of Autentico chalk paints, the shop specialises in new and upcycled furniture, complemented by homewares, jewellery and other bits and pieces that fit the rustic theme. It started as a partnership with Sylvia’s sister-in-law, Deborah, three years ago, then, due to family commitments, Deborah had to pull out. Sylvia decided to continue alone, assisted by a handful of staff who she says “keep her right”. She’s never happier than when in the workshop sanding and painting.

“I’m a farmer’s daughter so I don’t mind getting my hands dirty,” laughs Sylvia, 52. “I like to have paint on my hands and be covered in sawdust. I love to stand back and see what you can achieve with old pieces of wood and furniture which some people would think was fit for the scrapheap.”

Having spent most of her career as a nurse, Sylvia took time out to care for her children, James, now 28, and Amelia, 14. She lived in Alnwick, but decided to open Penny Pieces in her home village of Ponteland, to which she has now returned, with her husband establishing an estate agent’s next door to the shop. It has felt like coming full circle.

“It was a completely new venture, really, but it was something that started as somewhere to do my furniture and evolved into stocking the paint and doing bits of furniture and then looking for little accessories to add to them,” she says. “It can be shabby chic, but we also paint furniture to a very clean finish for people. Painted furniture now is not something you should just think of as shabby chic. I think it has moved on. The beauty of this paint is that it can be used to do furniture to a very fine finish with no distressing. That’s just as popular as a rustic finish.”

As well as using the paints herself, Sylvia runs workshops on how to apply them to furniture. In order to do this, she had to go to Autentico’s base in Kent to attend a training session. She loves the company’s ethos of using just two natural ingredients – chalk and water – and the fact that it’s small and personal. The paints are a perfect fit for what she does.

“There’s a variety of them now,” she says. “There’s a chalk paint that’s three-in-one, which has a built-in primer and sealer that make it very durable, but it still maintains that beautiful matt-chalk finish. The colour range is just incredible – from beautiful muted colours to fabulous Mediterranean reds and oranges.”

Central to Sylvia’s philosophy is being brave enough – and having the creative talent – to take something which might not appear lovely and strip it down and paint it, or remove, for example, a table top and replace it with another one. For her, furniture is part of the fabric of life, with all its attendant memories.

“We’ve done lots of things, from milking stools to Scotch chests,” she says. “For a commission, I would need to look at it to know whether it would be worth someone’s while, but I would say 95 per cent of furniture can be upcycled. A hugely popular thing at the moment is to have scaffold board table tops, so we can replace your table top with scaffold boards. Even on wrought iron, it looks fabulous.

“A lot of the old furniture was made in such a way – for example, with dovetail joints – that it would be very expensive to replace it with a piece that’s the same quality. I think for a lot of people, furniture has been in their family, possibly, for a lot of years, especially kitchen tables. People want to keep their table because they’ve got a lot of memories and a really good way we’ve found of keeping it is to sand back the top to reveal the wood underneath and either matt-varnish it or wax and paint the underside. One lady’s children drew underneath the table top and she wants to upcycle the table, but she doesn’t want to lose the memories.”

When thinking of a name for the shop, Sylvia wanted it to reflect her furniture as individual and unique. She hit upon the idea of embedding an old penny in every piece – and simply took this as a title. “It’s not always anywhere obvious, but we thought it was quite a quirk,” she says. “If, in years to come, we ever saw anything with a penny embedded, we would know it was one of our pieces.”

Over time, the shop’s reputation has spread, mainly by word of mouth and through its Facebook page, and it now has a core of loyal customers. In addition to the painting workshops she runs herself, Sylvia hosts classes in seasonal floristry and decoupage as well as those by renowned needle felter Betty Tidey and ReVamped Home Furnishings.

Like everything else, the workshops are hand-picked and in keeping with Sylvia’s belief in honest quality. “We’re very proud that we run individual workshops here,” she says. “It’s not a case of how many we can do, it’s a case of a chosen few that are done really well.”

There isn’t really a long-term plan – just the desire to continue serving customers to the best of Sylvia’s ability. “I feel so at home doing the job that I’m doing. I absolutely love it,” she says. “I like people to come into the shop and feel comfortable. They can walk around; they can ask questions – there’s always somebody here to advise them. Everything is priced and if it’s not, just ask.

“I think we’re very happy with what we’ve got and we’ve very proud to have reached this stage. Our ambition for the future is to continue to give that personal service and remain big enough to be noticed, but small enough to care, because the customers are what we are.”

Penny Pieces, AFI House, Street Houses, Ponteland. T: 01661-824424 W: facebook.com/Penny-Pieces. Open Monday-Saturday, 10am-4pm, Sunday, 11am-3pm