Lost & Found Market

I live in a «little old lady» style house with bright green tiles, wispy white curtains and a doorbell loud enough to make your hair curly. I love the retro look and feel and so naturally a great proportion of my furniture could be filed under the «little old lady» category. Hence my frequent visits to the Lost and Found Market.
Here you will find everything from 1950s mirrors to big, boofy prom dresses to Ken Done place mats and coasters. The Lost and Found Market has everything.
I go at least once a month to see what is new (they have rotating stalls) even when I am not looking for anything specific. While I admire their furniture the most (think stunning 70s Danish furniture) it is not something I believe I will ever be able to afford *sobs* but damn is it nice to look at.
While they do have an extensive clothing section, I personally believe the Lost and Found Market excels more in the bric-​à-​brac and glassware areas. If you’re looking to pimp your home bar, this is the place to be.
They are only open on Saturdays and Sundays but the huge warehouse style means there’s always something to find. You could honestly spend a good hour in here.

Lost & Found is just around the corner from home, so if I wander by on a weekend when it is open I more often than not pop inside to browse around.
Every time I go in I eye off the same set of lockers sitting in the side room, thinking how much I’d love to have them, but how there’s no way that I’ll ever pay the asking price (they’ve been sitting there for months guys, maybe it’s time to put a new price ticket on them?). I scour the cabinets for some cool toys that will look just great on the shelf at home and I usually always spy something I want. That is, until I turn the price tag over and pop it back amongst the rest of the clutter.
Not everything here is overpriced. If you look around you will find some cheaper items around and it is fun to discover the oddities crammed in everywhere. There seems to be a few items that look a lot older than they actually are, but there are some great things to be found.
Record collectors, there are several boxes for you to scrounge through. I’m not sure in the prices or quality of stuff in these boxes, but they’re there to dig through anyway. I’m not sure if its a regular thing but they’ also had a record fair in here recently. Comic book hunters, there are a few boxes of comics for $ 2 – 3 but they’re mostly rubbish. I have found a couple of issues here though that I picked up pretty much just because I liked the covers.
L&F is definitely worth a look, but you definitely have to dig to find that well-​priced gold.

Look don’t go here expecting to find your long lost cat or that sock that mysteriously went missing out of your top drawer, when you go to Brunswick’s lost and found market. But you can expect to find almost anything else in this gigantic store.
The Lost and Found Market is the sister store of Smith Street’s Lost and Found — so I am sure you are already familiar this business’s legacy of obtaining a massive range of retro gears.
Whilst I often find these kind of places overpriced — I still believe there are a lot of good bargains to be discovered at Lost and Found Market.

I like to think that this gigantic vintage store was named after the Elliott Smith song of — almost — the same name. But without the subtext of misery and unrequited love. There is nothing miserable about this bona fide Brunswick vintage Mecca.
For Lost & Found Market is one of the most lovable vintage stores in Melbourne, stocking an incredible range of vintage clothes, shoes, accessories, furniture, lighting and art from a characterful shop on Brunswick East’s Lygon Street.
I’ve only just discovered Lost & Found Market but it is already my favourite Melbourne vintage shop. And with good reason. Firstly, prices. I don’t want to say this for fear of tempting fate — or price increases — but Lost & Found is literally bargainous.
Secondly, selection. I’ve noticed a worrying trend for Melbourne’s vintage shops to only really stock clothes from the disco and power suit eras to the detriment of the wardrobes of us Art Deco, fifties and sixties loving gals. Not Lost & Found.
I walked away from Lost & Found Market with a ditty little sixties lace cocktail dress for a mere $ 55 and will no doubt return soon to look for more treasure. In the words of Elliott Smith ‘I’m in love’.

As my fellow reviewers attest the Lost and Found Market is so much less than the front signage suggests. Having recently moved into the area I felt I had stumbled across a winner where I could pick up some cheap second hand goods to furnish my room. How wrong I was.
Looking for a cheap desk? Well there was a pretty standard second hand model in excess of $ 150. How about a free-​standing lamp? $ 80.
Where exactly these items were lost from is debatable, but not as debatable as whoever is assigned to valuing them once they are newly found.
Good signage or no there are many more reasonably priced second shops in the Brunswick area to look at first.

This is a great concept, sort of like a Camberwell Market in content — mish mash of jumble, clothes, appliances, records, ornaments and miscellaneous — but the prices border on astronomical and the goods are on the whole a bit shoddy. I refuse to accept that a second-​hand, sleeve-​partly-​damaged copy of Neil Young’s ‘Harvest’ can be sold for over $ 10. In fact, this dude told me once that ‘Harvest’ is the yeard stick for second-​hand records. Apparently there were so any of these things pressed in the ‘70s that even now there’re pretty much more ‘Harvest’ LPs in circulation than anything else around. Therefore, he reasoned, any vendor attempting to flick ‘Harvest’ for more than about $ 5 (and that’s for a mint copy), is ripping you off and you should shop around.
They do, however, have fabulous front signage, and if the staff weren’t so moody (at least for the first, and only, time I will set foot in the joint), you could probably blow a couple of hours and a couple of hundred bucks on crap you don’t need. Still, it’s a great concept.

The outer walls of the building, once a machine grey, now hold a brightly painted red and yellow stripes of a circus tent pulled assist to let you into the shopping experience that is Lost & Found Market. Think op shop vintage blended with new in all forms — clothes, books and furniture. The mannequins are dressed well enough for you to accidentally ask them questions. Prices are hit and miss, but at the same time it’s more than apparent the op shop next door will not have what you’re looking for, it’s probably been raided.