Somewhat Restoring a Vintage Traditional Korean Closet

Somewhat Restoring a Vintage Traditional Korean Closet

For as long as I can remember I have naturally looked out for people throwing out what they consider trash. So when I saw some furniture on the side of the street a while ago, my eyes immediately fell onto this closet that, in spite of it missing a few parts, seemed to be in good enough condition. And so I did.

The closet right after taking it home.

I'm guessing someone found this before me and instead of taking the entire closet home, settled on ripping off several of the easy to access bronze pieces. Unfortunate, but not unfixable. Finding the exact matching items would be a bit too challenging, so my wife focussed on finding elements that would match the general mood of the closet, as we're not going for accuracy so much as we are for aesthetically pleasing.

The "fashion points" on either top corner were missing, as-well as the door and drawer handles.

Replacements

Lovely!
It's quite a simple system. I had to deepen the original hole a bit but otherwise it was very straight-forward.
Before deepening the original holes somewhat.
Done!

The drawers were slightly more challenging, as we just could not find handles that matched the original's size. They were either too small, or too large. So we settled on a simple ring and closed the original holes with some liquid wood and a somewhat closely matching wood fix color thingamajig. It's a lot more obvious in the photo but in real it's not very noticeable. Not ideal, for sure, but it works.

At the time of fixing these parts I did not yet have all the parts required to fix the doors, so they still need work, but we have the handle for it at least.

The handle/lock mechanism of the door, yet to be installed.

That's all for now. I think it's a great looking closet and I hope to find some additional, similar design units later on. For now I ended up switching my sound setup to this, which looks really quite nice I think.