Why we love Vintage Esavian school desks

Vintage school desks are without doubt our favourites here at Blue Ticking. They are the crux of our business and what you also, along with storage solutions get most excited about. We sell a range of desks to suit every space, age and activity but there is one brand of desk that is a bit of a stand out for us. We love everything Esavian (ESA)! If it has the ESA stamp on it then we will buy it!

For those of you who don’t know ESA stands for Educational Supply Association and they were the post war leading supplier of school books, furniture and laboratory equipment. Esavian represented low cost, good quality furniture which was made to last and many of their desks and chairs can be found in schools up and down the country having been made in the 50s and 60s.

Over the last few years we have come into contact with many different pieces of Esavian furniture and we have restored many desk and chair sets. You generally see two Esavian desks designs; the classic wooden lift up lid ones and the die cast aluminium legged compass design.

Wooden Esavian school desks

These are your classic school desks and probably what many of you would have used at school. They have the lift up lids often with a pen indent and inkwell and are just incredibly well built. This wooden school desk comes in various shapes and sizes but always with the lift up lid. Some, like the desk pictured below have the half lift up lid which is a bit of a winner if you don’t want to move everything off the desk to open the top.

Compass legged Esavian school desks

All ESA furniture proves popular but the compass leg style designed by James Leonard never hangs around for long. I don’t blame our customers for snapping these up because the legs are so pleasing to the eye and it’s a design which is still very relevant and sits really well alongside more contemporary furniture.

We tend to leave these desks as they are because the design and quality is so good and we don’t want to detract from that. The single desks tend to have the wooden lift up lids whilst the doubles have either a wooden or formica top.

Basically there is a style, shape and size Esavian desk to suit all!

You can see our full range of desks and tables here and if you would like us to source something in particular don’t hesitate to get in touch.

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