Ndesign: David Clair, Clair & Co.

If you’re making a list of situations where the Old World comfortably collides with contemporary culture, look no further than Clair & Co., where antiques restoration expert David Clair will restore the gilding on an 18th-century mirror or replace the leather top on an English Edwardian desk, all in exchange for payment in Bitcoin.

Of course, David accepts old-timey tender as well, but his ease with cryptocurrency — marked by the decal on his storefront window — speaks to his nimbleness in mastering new technologies, whether collecting payments on the blockchain or repairing an antique grand piano that was shattered in transit from England to the U.S.   

David’s studio and showroom in Wedgewood-Houston, across Fourth Avenue from the Nashville City Cemetery, abound with treasures in various states of disrepair. Chests, tables, candelabra, mirrors, oil paintings and sculptures wait patiently in a room that reads like an orderly mashup of a Downton Abbey home and an auto-collision repair shop, with its practically punk-rock juxtaposition of handwoven rugs and gilt frames against industrial tool drawers and exposed building elements. On any given day, a rustic French fruitwood table with a damaged top, a ceramic feline statue with a broken paw, and a 5-foot gold-framed mirror with shattered rope trim all anticipate the skilled TLC of David, inked with tattoos and possibly wearing a vintage Morrissey T-shirt.

Born in Clarksville, Tenn., and raised in Texas and Maryland, David says he “grew up in a workshop.” He learned at the foot of his carpenter father and eventually became an apprentice for a cabinetmaker who worked for the French embassy in Washington, D.C. That early hands-on, craft-based résumé developed David’s expertise in artwork and furniture restoration and gave him a fluency in design taxonomy — Louis XIV-XVI, Empire, Georgian, Victorian, Edwardian, Art Nouveau and Deco — that would make an art history major swoon. Soon after graduating high school, David became a resource to insurance companies to assess and restore damages, with projects at landmark venues including The Jefferson Hotel in Washington, D.C., the offices of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Irish Embassy.

Along the way, David began buying and selling antiques, concentrating on 18th- and 19th-century works, before eventually tightening his focus to restoration and moving to Nashville’s Wedgewood-Houston neighborhood in 2022. He recently relocated to his current storefront, which he shares with interior designer Kristy Cohn and her collection of art and accessories.

“Honestly, I can repair just about anything you see in a house,” says David, who demonstrates his broad-based technical skills, including French polishing, hand lacquering and furniture modification, through an active social media presence. His Instagram provides endless distraction for armchair woodworkers who enjoy laborious and gritty before-and-after videos of sanding, filling, finishing and coloring artifacts back to their former grandeur.

Stashed among the projects awaiting David’s painstaking renovation and repair, there’s also a raft of apparently pristine objects, whose former flaws David has seamlessly erased. Tables and chairs with buttery finishes restored, oil portraits with decades of fireplace soot removed, and inlaid surfaces patched like perfect puzzles now await shopping or shipping to homes in Nashville and beyond.