We never set out to sell posters. We collected old images because we loved having them on our walls, and Moryarty grew out of that, long before there was any business to build.

This is how Moryarty started. Maybe you also keep a picture at home just because you love looking at it. That's exactly where our story begins.

We collected the images we wanted to live with

Since we were young, we collected vintage images, posters and photographs simply to decorate our bedroom. When we had a flat of our own, the habit moved with us. We weren't building a collection. We were just making the places we lived in look the way we wanted.

Vintage vinyl records joined the pictures for the same reason. Their covers were images we wanted to look at, and some of them deserved a wall as much as any poster. Our collecting was never limited to posters alone.

On trips abroad we started buying pictures to bring home as memories of the places we had been. Once they were on our walls at home, the rooms reminded us of those journeys.

After the trips, internet auction sites widened the search far beyond the cities we could visit. Markets and antiques fairs were a step further: we started going to them in person to hunt for more posters. We couldn't have guessed that a market was where the story would turn.

By the time any idea of a business appeared, the collection held nearly one hundred pieces from all over the world: postcards, posters, vintage advertisements, record covers.

Suggested posters

• Charles Goy's 1928 advertisement with blue birds has a repeating flock that forms a pattern almost like fabric across the page. It's a poster we'd happily put on our own wall.
• Adriaan van Hoff's 1923 poster of spoonbills draws the birds in bold black and white shapes with nothing extra, simple enough to hold its own on any wall.
• A fashion model balanced on the edge of a boat in Montego Bay, photographed by Toni Frissell, has the calm black and white of a mid-century photograph and the feel of a travel memory worth keeping on a wall.

We followed an address we found in Berlin

The day that changed everything came in 2017, at a market in Berlin. Among the stalls we found an old image, and on the back of it someone had written a name and an address. The address was in the same city where we were standing. We had no idea what we'd find if we went to that address. We only knew that the image was old, that the handwriting belonged to a stranger, and that the address was close.

So we went. We found the street, the building and the name on the intercom, and we rang. A voice answered. We tried to explain, as well as we could, that we had found his address written on the back of an old image, and that we were looking for posters. We waited there, not knowing what would happen next.

The man opened the door and let us in. He offered us a drink, and then we saw his home. It was full of old posters, advertisements and newspapers, everywhere you looked. He lived alone. He told us he had worked at markets all his life, and that age had made it impossible to keep working at markets.

We talked for more than two hours before he showed us the collection itself. Seven hundred vintage images of every kind, gathered over a working life at the markets. We decided to buy them all. That visit turned a hobby into the idea of a business, and it remains, to us, the true beginning of Moryarty.

We were far from home with boxes of posters in our Berlin hotel room. We packaged them into several parcels and shipped them ahead, hoping the images would arrive undamaged and, in all honesty, hoping we'd get back before the parcels did.

Suggested posters

• A 1926 advertisement for Cordial Campari, with its poised woman in flat planes of red and black, shows how bold an old advertisement could be.
• A 1902 cycling poster for Achtung Möve shows a rider in a pale yellow suit and a striped cap, posing proudly rather than racing.
• A 1912 plan of the Paris métro is the sort of map you can stand and study for ten minutes, the way you would in a good shop.

We built the website before the project had a name

Back in Barcelona, the work began with scanners. We scanned the images one by one and restored each of them by hand, then bought second-hand professional printers and put the first prints on a very simple website.

Our very first poster was an image of the Moon, and it remains one of our favourites. Around it, everything was new. We knew almost nothing about ecommerce, online advertising or shipping.

The project also still had no name and no real domain. We went through a long list of possibilities, checking which names had their domains free. Nearly everything good was taken in .com, and the names that were available didn't convince us.

Then, at about four in the morning, we lay in bed unable to sleep, turning names over in our heads, and the name came to us. Moryarty. The name was short, memorable, and had a character of its own. Read it aloud and you can hear More Art, or More Arty. The slogan we thought of was Moryarty, Art and More.

We were big fans of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and Moriarty is the villain in them. The link to the villain of the stories we loved made us like the name even more. Then we checked the domains. The .com and the European domains were all free, every one of them, which felt like a sign. We bought them all that same night, at four in the morning. Moryarty was born.

Suggested posters

• A hand drawn after plaster in 1829 is a quiet study, and its fine shading is exactly what careful scanning and restoration by hand have to keep.
• Will Bradley's deep blue peacock poster from 1895 is a poster made to announce posters, and its Art Nouveau lettering is part of the sweep of the design.

We turned part of a warehouse into our first shop

The website, to be honest, sold almost nothing, and it didn't match the vision we had in our heads. We wanted a place full of posters from floor to ceiling, with hundreds of drawings to look through in different sizes, and frames to see and touch. We wanted people to come in, feel the prints, compare them and find the perfect piece for their home at their own pace. The shop had to recreate the experience we had at markets and antiques shops, and a website alone couldn't do that.

There was a practical side too. With so many bad reviews of websites selling cheap posters, people want to see the print and feel the paper before they choose, and in a shop the poster is in your hands before you decide. A shop also gives you what a good record shop gives: time to browse, make your selection and enjoy the moment.

We already rented an old warehouse in Barcelona for the stock and logistics of a completely different project. So we divided the space, renovated part of it and opened a shop inside it. It was the quickest, simplest and least risky way to try the idea for real, and it let us find out very fast whether anyone else wanted the thing we wanted.

After a few months of printing, painting and preparing, the first Moryarty shop, Poblenou, opened in 2018. Two walls, each ten by five metres, covered in posters. One hundred square metres given over to vintage wall art.

It was wonderful to watch the first people come in and spend time looking at the posters. They stayed. They gave us incredible feedback. Then the first sales arrived, and they grew. That growth was our real motivation to keep going.

We still run the shops the way we opened the first one. We take care of the playlist, the light and the scent, and we never push or bother anyone. People browse the way they would in a library, and some spend more than an hour among the posters.

Suggested posters

• A 1912 poster for the Munich zoo, Ludwig Hohlwein's leopard and panther, catches your eye from across the room.
• An anonymous 1920 poster of Jamaica bananas is a bright old advertisement that stops you as you browse.

We restore and print the posters you can bring home

After those first sales, we worked day and night to grow the catalogue beyond two thousand posters and to make the website better. Then the other shops came. El Born, Chiado, LX Factory and Trindade followed Poblenou, until two cities had a Moryarty to wander into.

Today five shops serve Barcelona and Lisbon, and the online business grows alongside them. Sales rise month by month, and people write to us every day to tell us how happy they are with their posters. Our prices stay accessible on purpose, because we believe art shouldn't be only for people with high incomes.

The images themselves come from libraries, museums, online collections, private collections and markets. Each one is scanned in very high resolution, and then the real work begins: hours of hand correction to remove defects, bring back the colours and revive the image without ever changing its design. Every reproduction stays as close to the original as we can make it.

Print quality, we learned, is mostly a question of paper. We changed papers several times before we found the right one, a museum-quality fine art matte. We were tempted more than once to switch to bigger printers made for heavy, fast production. Switching would have saved us time and money. Big production machines would have cost us the combination of our archival matte paper and very colourful pigment inks. So we kept our own printers. Every poster is printed in-house in our Barcelona workshop, on 230 gsm paper with archival pigment inks.

We also make our own frames, in aluminium, pine wood and magnetic wood, and when a frame is ordered with a poster, we fit it free of charge. Our packaging is plastic-free, and we ship across Europe.

It has been a crazy adventure, and it's just the beginning. All these years later, we're still as excited as we were on the first day, and there is more coming. Soon we'll announce something new: a completely different product, still tied to art, posters and decoration, but unexpected. We can't say more yet. What we can say is that the invitation is the same one it has always been. Go slowly through our selection, and find the image you want to live with.

Suggested posters

• A 1950 poster for the Punch Boutique, with its woman and zebra, is mid-century wit at its best.
• A botanical study of the coffee plant, drawn in 1870, is an image we restore with care, so every fine line survives on the print.

Did you know?

• Every frame in the frames collection is glazed with methacrylate, which is lighter and tougher than glass and doesn't break in transit.
• The LX Factory shop in Lisbon sits on the first floor of the Ler Devagar bookshop, and you can find every address on the store locator.
• You can choose a magnetic wood frame in light pine, light oak, dark oak or black pine in the magnetic frames collection.
• Our frames are easy to put together, with step-by-step assembly instructions.
• In our shops we see people of all ages, genders and origins buying posters every day.

Things people ask us

Where does the name Moryarty come from? We wanted something short and memorable. It reads as More Art, or More Arty, and we soon thought of the line Moryarty, Art and More. The y in the middle sets our spelling apart from the Sherlock Holmes villain Moriarty, though we like the echo.

Where are the Moryarty shops? There are two in Barcelona, El Born and Poblenou, and three in Lisbon: Chiado, LX Factory and Trindade. Every address is on the store locator, and you'll find the nearest shop there.

Does Moryarty ship across Europe? Yes. Orders are made in 24 to 48 hours, and delivery takes 2 to 4 days depending on where you are. Every order leaves our Barcelona workshop in plastic-free packaging.

Are Moryarty posters original vintage posters? Our posters are fine-art reproductions of vintage images, restored by hand and printed in our Barcelona workshop on 230 gsm matte paper with archival pigment inks. The restoration keeps each design and its colours as close to the original as we can make them.

How many posters does Moryarty have? More than two thousand. They're also sold in more than ten design shops, bookshops and concept stores across Europe, so you may already have met us without knowing.

Why vintage posters? A poster was made to catch someone's eye from across a street or a room. On a wall today it still does the job it was designed for.

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About the author

We're the team behind Moryarty, a European company with five shops in Barcelona and Lisbon. Every poster is restored by hand before it is printed in-house in our Barcelona workshop, and our collection holds more than 2,000 vintage posters. We began as collectors who wanted good images on our own walls, and that wish still guides how we choose what enters the collection and how we talk about it.