As a young boy, living in the southern Italian town of Taranto on the Ionian Sea, Claudio Mariani trained with his artisan father and grandfather in the art of furniture making. In the five decades since, he’s established himself as a preeminent antiques restorer and a gifted craftsman of fine, museum-quality furniture in another town-on-the-sea, more than 6,500 miles away: San Francisco.
Thirty-six years after opening his 33,000-square-foot gallery and workshop, C. Mariani Antiques, which has been dubbed the “Louvre with price tags,” Mariani uses the same centuries-old methods to painstakingly repair and bring back to their original condition furnishings and domestic treasures that once resided in Europe’s finest homes and estates—or to re-create the furniture himself.
When it comes to restoration, Mariani shuns modern advances, using products and formulas that
