The estimated price of $135,000 to $250,000 is, according to the auction house, something of a wild guess. Norton said.Īll this commotion will end on May 19, when Sotheby's, Sussex, sells the paneling to a buyer willing to remove it from the apartment. ''We're occupied every day showing people the flat,'' Mrs. Norton said.Īmong them were Ken Marschall, a maritime illustrator and adviser on the hit movie ''Titanic,'' a ''coachload of Americans'' from the Titanic Historical Society, based in Indian Orchard, Mass., and countless visitors who have turned up unannounced. ''We've met so many lovely people only through discovering the a la carte restaurant,'' Mrs. The paneling, the picture indicated, appeared to be from the first-class a la carte restaurant of the Olympic, the sister ship of the Titanic, to which it was nearly identical in design and construction. His suspicion was confirmed when he found an old photograph at a maritime library in nearby Liverpool. ''It looked too ornate to be off a warship,'' he said. Norton's son, Glyn Samuel, a hairdresser who lives up the road, was curious. The paneling, they were told, had come off a German battleship. There, in the ground-floor flat of an unassuming Victorian house in Southport, a seaside town in the north of England, was Edwardian splendor: paneling of satin veneer in the living room, dining room and entrance hall, all ornamented with gold in the Louis XVI style. ''All we want now is a cozy little bungalow.''įourteen years ago, she and her husband, Fred, were shown the apartment in which they now live and were astonished by what they saw.

''PEOPLE think we're mad for selling it, but I'm getting too old to do the polishing,'' said Joy Norton, who is 75, referring to the lustrous walnut paneling that has changed her life.

Titanic a la carte restaurant