Follow your Heart: A Brocante Life in Australia

Our Follow your Heart series takes us to France where a tight-knit family works quietly, steadily, to bring beautiful brocante and French vintage homewares to Australia through the passion of Australian based brocanteuse, Aurelie Francois of My French Finds.

Searching for something with a past

“I started my brocante business in Australia from a simple, persistent feeling: I couldn’t find the things I loved.

I missed objects with character, the kind you grow up with in France. Pieces that carry time in them. A chipped bowl, a worn wooden stool, linen softened by years of use. In Australia, everything felt a little too new, a little too well-behaved. I was searching for something with a past… and perhaps a little attitude.

So I began bringing it back with me.

French vintage finds a family approach

What started with a few carefully chosen pieces soon grew into something much bigger. Today, I run an online brocante, sourcing French antiques and vintage finds and sending them to homes across Australia. But what people see is only part of the story. Behind it is something deeply personal and very much a family affair.

My father wakes before dawn, in the soft quiet of the French countryside, at an hour when even the day is still deciding what it will be. With coffee in one hand and a piece of baguette in the other, the house still half-asleep around him, he sets off to vide-greniers, moving through villages and fields, searching in places where objects have been waiting for years to be noticed again. When I’m in France, we do it together, early mornings, long days, choosing piece by piece.

A barn becomes a French vintage treasure chest

And when I return to Australia, he continues for me, moving through brocantes and auctions with the same eye, the same instinct, as if I were still there beside him. We know what to look for instinctively. Perhaps it’s something we grew up with, a familiarity with these pieces, a way of recognising what carries a story. My mother follows with quiet precision, cleaning, sorting, and preparing each piece as if it were about to meet someone important, which, in a way, it is. Together, we store everything in our barn, which fills steadily, then suddenly. When space runs out, we negotiate with it, the garage, the house, a corner here, a corner there.

 

History can sit quietly on a table and still be felt

My daughters are growing up somewhere inside this story. I like to think they are learning, without quite realising it, that a plate is never just a plate. That history can sit quietly on a table and still be felt. That objects, like people, carry their past with them.

Packing a container is always a moment in itself. Early mornings, friends gathered, wrapping and stacking each piece, playing a careful game of will it fit? It always does, eventually. Then come the less poetic steps: customs, paperwork, and the long journey across the sea.

What I love most about this work is what it holds together. It keeps me close to where I come from, while allowing me to build something meaningful where I am. It connects me, too, to the women who welcome these pieces into their homes, drawn, like me, to objects that have lived a little.

I didn’t follow a clear plan. I followed a feeling.

And slowly, with the help of my family, that feeling became a life.”

Aurélie.

You can follow Aurelie’s journey through instagram’s My French Finds, through her online store, and through the markets she attends in Queensland.

All rights reserved: Aurelie Francois, 2026