Meet Instagram’s Steptoe

When the country went into lockdown, Natalia Rawley had to spend every hour of every day sharing a house with four boisterous boys. She began to wonder if she had room for all her possessions. Either the boys or the antiques would have to go. Maternal instinct beat materialism.

“I’ve always been a passionate treasure hunter,” she says. “When others at university spent their money in the pub, I went round secondhand shops. But with everyone at home during Covid, I asked myself whether I really needed 30 patchwork quilts.”

She put one of them up for sale online. It sold immediately and she realised that there might be a business in finding new homes for old property. Six years on and that company, called Natalia Violet (her grandmother’s name and the one she would have given to a daughter), is one of the positives to come out of Covid.

Her Instagram account has 27,000 followers, who snap up the bargains she finds when clearing out people’s houses. Downsizers and declutterers are surprised what she can sell for them online.

“Every drawer you open has potential,” Rawley says of her talent for spotting a sale in items that might be thrown away. “My job is to save them from landfill.”

Recycle, rehome and relove is her mantra. “Of course, you always walk into a house thinking, ‘This time I will find a Rembrandt’ – I’m a huge optimist – but I get as much pleasure from helping people to turn small things into a bit of unexpected money.”

Rawley compares herself gleefully to a rag and bone man, though the objects she sells, stored in a barn at her Wiltshire home, are in better nick than you would have found in Steptoe and Son’s yard – treasures rather than tat – and she has cleared out everywhere from a small attic to a castle. Nor is there any of the Steptoes’ moaning. Her Instagram is filled with videos of Rawley hooting with joy at the delights she has just unearthed.

Among recent posts, there is a Habitat bed (£195) and a pair of Ralph Lauren linen curtains (£550) but also cheaper items such as an oak salt cellar in the form of a mouse (£85) and a watercolour of Paris (£55). Anyone with the initials NR might fancy a set of napkins embroidered with the letters for £60 and there is plenty for a tenner.

Nostalgia for the everyday possessions of older generations, perhaps things we grew up seeing and now wish to own, is strong. “There are some snobs in the antiques world who would look down their noses at some of the things I pick up,” she says. What she calls “chintzy granny chic” is popular again, as are pieces of brown furniture that were once destined for firewood. It’s about comfort.

There seems to be a fashion for high-quality online house clearance by women. Gail O’Reilly, also from Wiltshire, hunts down antiques and soft furnishings which she sells to her 14,000 followers on Instagram, while Louise from Keepers Finds does the same in Margate, Kent, though she’s currently taking a break after having a baby.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that when the veteran detective fiction writer Simon Brett was looking for a new amateur sleuth in 2020 he made Ellen Curtis a professional declutterer. The fifth book in the series is out next month.

Rawley studied art history at Edinburgh, then took an MA in arts therapy, which she has found to be a good combination when handling the possessions of someone who has just died.

“It is a very emotional time,” she says. “You have to be sensitive with people who are grieving. But often they don’t realise there is money in the things their loved ones had hoarded for decades.”

She speaks of a group of four children whose parents died in close succession to each other. After they had taken the treasured heirlooms, the children asked Rawley to see if there was anything left of value. “What I sold for them fetched £10-12,000, which they used for a lovely family holiday together,” she says.

Another client asked her to clear a cottage, in the bathroom of which she found a tooth mug, which she recognised as Wemyss Ware, a Scottish pottery range founded in the 1880s, that counted the late Queen Mother among its most devoted customers. It fetched £300. In one flat, she found a drawing by Lucian Freud – “they didn’t know” – though on that occasion she advised them they would get much more for it selling at auction.

A lot of interior decorators have also come to her to buy small things to outfit a home. “People seem to be interested in knick-knacks again,” she said. “You can have the most expensive furniture but it’s those scattered trinkets that give a house its heart.”

The smallest object can form a connection. Someone bought a cup with “Elizabeth” painted on it for their goddaughter. Another found a watercolour of an iris for £10 as a gift for a friend named after the flower. For all the materialism of our age, a thoughtful pre-loved gift is often more appreciated than an expensive new one.

One woman bought a wool len blanket for her bedridden mother, into which she tucked biscuits and chocolates as a surprise. “I love making people happy,” Rawley said. Not very Steptoe at all.

Rawley has three friends who help her with the business but she is not yet ready to put “& Sons” above the door. “I’d love to bring my boys into it one day but they’re a bit too keen on sport at the moment,” she says.

Photograph by Evening Standard/Getty Images, Natalia Violet