Max Rollitt has antiques in his blood. His mother was a successful dealer, and after getting an education in furniture restoration, he apprenticed for a workshop before eventually taking over the family business in 1993. “I didn’t work for anybody else from then on,” he tells host Dennis Scully on the latest episode of The Business of Home Podcast. “I bought problems, and I solved them. We still buy things that sometimes need too much work, but there’s a joy in it. There’s a joy in bringing things back to life.”

In 2005, a chance encounter with a patron of his shop brought Rollitt his first interior design job—a project that inspired him to expand the business to include design work, as well as furniture reproduction and upholstery. “It’s all grown very gently,” he says.

Rollitt also recently partnered with Schumacher to create a moody, pattern-rich dining room—a room that offers a host of unique problems to solve for today’s client—for the upcoming Wow!house showhouse at London’s Design Centre Chelsea Harbour. “The dining room is not an obvious place to start for anybody,” he notes. “It’s always slightly challenging. It’s become way less important—people entertain in different ways nowadays.” He sought to change that with an array of antique furniture and some of his bespoke creations. “We lack the formality and the idea of dressing up. To feel relaxed in a grand environment wearing casual clothes is difficult,” he says. “So we’re just trying to bring all of that together, so you feel relaxed, you feel at ease. There is some formality and grandeur, because why not play into that and just be exuberant. We lack exuberance, we lack play, we lack fun in the home, and I think that’s what I’m trying to introduce.”

Crucial insight: Rollitt believes the reduced number of antique dealers has strengthened the industry. “We’re all very focused on what we’re doing, and there are a lot of auctions that are still rattling on,” he says. “It’s a great time to become an antique dealer or go into the business, because it has been so depressed for so long. There is a lot of potential within it, but you have to develop what we call the eye. You can develop an eye by just working at it, but it also is very dependent on making decisions. The thing about antique DNA is you’re constantly making decisions, and that has proven really useful to me going into interior design, being decisive at the critical moment and [putting] my money where my mouth is.”

Key quote: “Ornament has its place. I work with a lot of antique furniture and objects, and there’s such richness and delight within all of that ornament. To almost banish it feels tragic. I feel like the fineness of detail has to come back, and I think the technological skills are now returning to that point where we will be able to have that again. It’s all been lost through everything becoming mechanized, and people producing things for simplicity’s sake, and now technology is taking us to a point where we can put ornament back into pieces.”

This episode is sponsored by Ernesta and Kohler. Listen to the show below. If you like what you hear, subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

The Thursday Show

Host Dennis Scully and BOH executive editor Fred Nicolaus discuss the biggest news in the design world, including a major lighting acquisition, the AI vibe shift, and whether the industry’s beige epidemic is really over. Later, designer Nathan Turner joins the show to talk about his new book, I Love Decorating.

This episode is sponsored by Loloi and Resource Furniture. Listen to the show below. If you like what you hear, subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.