About us
A short list of houses, held properly
Kinship is an independent resale house. We carry a small number of names, stock them in depth rather than in breadth, and photograph and authenticate every piece ourselves.
What we do
Second-hand is the wrong word for it
Most of what we carry has been owned before, and some of it has never been carried at all. Neither fact is the interesting one. What matters is that the piece is what it says it is, that its condition is described honestly, and that somebody here has held it.
That is the whole business, and it is why it stays small.
Kinship in numbers
- 15
- houses on the list
- 108
- pieces in stock
- 5
- rooms, in five cities
- 7
- years, so far
Four things we hold to
Depth over breadth
A house goes on the list when we can hold it properly: enough pieces to be worth looking through, photographed by us, and known well enough that we can answer a question without checking. That is a slow way to grow a list, and it is why the list is short.
One piece, one page
Almost everything we sell is a single object. The photographs are of that object, in our room, in our light. Nothing is a stock image, nothing is a representative sample, and where a piece has been carried the pictures show where.
Said plainly
Condition is described in words that mean something. If there is a mark on the base we say there is a mark on the base and show it, rather than reaching for a grading word that lets everybody avoid the subject.
A room you can walk into
Resale works better in person, so all of it exists somewhere physical. Five rooms, in five cities, holding the same stock the site does — you can buy online and return in store, or handle a piece before you decide.
How it got here
2019
Two rooms of stock above a framer's in Marylebone, and one house on the list.
2021
The first authentication bench. Everything checked twice from this point on.
2023
Paris and Milan. Stock moves between rooms rather than sitting in one.
2025
New York and Tokyo, and the list reaches its current length.
Where to go next
Or start with the houses we carry.