Home Décor
Buy and sell rugs, lamps and mirrors in Panama.
A framed mola from Guna Yala over the sofa does more for a rented apartment than a canvas print, and it is one of the few decorative pieces that keeps its value second-hand. The rest of home décor is about changing a room without calling in a builder: rugs and curtains alter how it sounds and how much afternoon sun gets in, while lamps and mirrors change how big it feels. New and pre-owned pieces both belong here. Some of the best used décor comes out of apartments being cleared at the end of a lease or a posting abroad, often offered as one lot.
What a rented apartment lets you change, from the floor to the light:
when paint and fixed fittings are the landlord’s call, décor does the work. Underfoot, rugs soften a tiled floor and take the echo out of a bare room. At the window, curtains and blinds do different jobs: fabric curtains dress a room, while a roller or blackout blind controls glare. Lighting sets the mood; a floor lamp and two table lamps with warm bulbs will do more than any single ceiling fitting. Mirrors make a narrow living room read wider, and when the big pieces stay put, cushions and home fragrances are the quick, cheap change.
Measuring for a rug, a curtain rail or a mirror before you pay:
the commonest mistake is a rug that is too small. In a living room the front legs of the sofa and chairs should sit on it. Curtain panels look full when their combined width is about twice the window’s, hung from a rail fixed above the frame and wider than it. Hang a mirror with its centre near eye height, and pick bulbs by colour as well as brightness: warm white in living rooms and bedrooms, a cooler white over a desk.
Guna molas and Wounaan baskets on a Panamanian wall:
a mola is a panel of reverse appliqué sewn by Guna women, layers of cotton stacked, cut away and hemmed by hand so the colours underneath show through. Made as the front and back of a blouse, panels are now framed as art or sewn into cushion covers. Emberá and Wounaan weavers in Darién coil baskets and plates from black palm fibre coloured with natural dyes, and the same communities carve cocobolo wood and vegetable ivory, the hard white seed of another palm, into animals and figures. A well-made mola costs from about $40 to $200, priced on its layers, the fineness of its stitching and its size; the finest coiled palm baskets start around $80 and large collector pieces run well into the hundreds. That handwork is why they hold their value second-hand, while a mass-produced canvas or resin vase resells for a small part of what it cost.
Telling a hand-sewn mola from a printed one, and checking a used mirror or rug:
run a finger along the cut edges of a mola. Hand hemming leaves tiny stitches you can feel, and a cut held up to the light shows two or more layers of cloth. Turn it over: the back of a real one shows folded edges and stitching, a printed copy shows nothing or more print. Perfectly even lines are a warning, not a selling point. On a basket, the coils should be tight and even with no gaps. Everything else fails in plain sight. Black spots creeping in from a mirror’s edges mean the silvering is lifting, and they only spread. Plug a lamp in and work the switch. Smell a rug and turn it over; a musty smell rarely washes out, and a backing that crumbles means it will keep shedding.
Clearing an apartment in El Cangrejo of its rugs, lamps and frames:
list a mola, a large mirror or a good rug on its own and bundle the small things into one lot. Give the measurements a buyer would otherwise ask for, rug size, curtain drop and panel width, and photograph in daylight with the back of any mirror shown. If you know which island a mola came from or which community made a basket, say so; people who collect craft pay for that. Framing hides a mola’s back, so a photo taken before it went behind glass, or a frame whose backing opens, settles the hand-sewn question before a buyer sets off from La Chorrera to see it.