I love coat hooks. For the past several years I’ve been collecting hooks of all types, especially the simple bent wire variety.
This is a selection taken from current eBay auctions – just search “antique wire coat hook.” I love looking at all the different ways the same problem was solved.
Prices on eBay are high; I recommend going to the local salvage yard and snooping around. I’ve even talked junk shop proprietors into letting me remove the hooks from old coat stands and wardrobes.
Be careful when mounting coat hooks. Most of them were intended to screw directly into wood, so the screw threads are small. Unfortunately, most of our houses are lined in drywall, which is little better than dense sand. If you can’t screw the hook into wood, make sure to use an appropriate drywall anchor.
For more on archival housekeeping, please see our previous post on Mendelson’s amazing tome.
You could also mount the hooks to a complimentary strip of wood and then screw the strip into the studs with longer hardware.
jiheison: absolutely. that’s what i usually do with my own hooks – with apologies to shaker peg rail.
You can also buy them super cheap like here – http://www.sears.com/shc/s/p_10153_12605_SPM213923111P?sid=IDx20070921x00003a&ci_src=14110944&ci_sku=SPM161692800 and then use a brass darkening solution to make it look older.
This makes me ill, because I recently bought a 1930’s house and it was decked out with these and of course I unscrewed them all and dumped them to make way for “new” hooks from Home Depot. Now I’m realizing the errors of my way and trolling Etsy for the very same hooks I got rid of.
I’ve got a wireworking shop in Portland Ore near Rejuvenation. My main gig is handmade birdcages but I dabble in coat hooks etc, and Rejuvenation is a great source of inspiration. They’ve got drawers full of these hooks! I especially like the ones with extremely long upper hooks to accommodate tophats.