All the big stories begin in a barn.

Our Story

The garage. The shed. The barn. Almost nothing that changed the world was born in an office. It started in a cold room with a concrete floor, because that was the room available, and because somebody cared enough to keep walking out to it in the evenings. Those rooms are where the patience lives.

El Granero means the barn. Ours is in Fuengirola, on the southern coast of Spain, and on any given day it holds around five hundred typewriters in various states of undress.

We were both born in Poland and moved to southern Spain twenty-five years ago. Jacek is a photographer and a graduate in film studies. Ania taught English. Neither of those is an obvious route into repairing machines built before we were born, and for a long time it was not a route at all; it was a shared weakness for old objects.

What turned the weakness into a business was the street market. The largest flea market in Spain — twenty thousand square metres of it — runs a short drive from our door, and we spent years walking it on Sunday mornings, coming home with typewriters, lamps, books, and things we had no room for. In 2013 we opened El Granero as a vintage gift shop, mostly to give all of it somewhere to live. The typewriters took over within a few years, and we let them.

Before El Granero, Ania spent years in classrooms, teaching thousands of students of every age: small children, teenagers, adults beginning again from scratch. None of that transfers to a typewriter except the parts that matter most: patience, a real liking for people, and the knack for putting anyone at ease within a minute of meeting them. Most of what clients remember about buying from us is her doing.

Jacek's other training turned out to matter more than the photography. He qualified in construction, and to that he adds the kind of hands that understand a mechanism by touch and an eye that cannot leave an ugly object alone. Between the two, there is not much on a typewriter he cannot bring back.

A typewriter does one thing. It has no notifications, no second tab, no update waiting to install. Whatever you put on the paper stays on the paper. That single-mindedness is why people still want these machines, and it is the reason we spend our days taking them apart.

Founders

Jacek

Technician & Art Director

Photographer, film graduate, trained in construction, and self-taught on everything with a carriage return. He restores the machines and decides how all of this looks.

Repair & restoration

Ania

Typewriters, Accounts & Events

The reason a parcel from El Granero arrives wrapped like a present. She looks after clients, runs the events, and holds together the dozen companies that carry a machine from our bench to your door.

Talk to Ania

There is no call centre and no chain of shops. There is a workbench, the two of us, and several hundred machines waiting their turn.

What happens in the workshop

Every machine that arrives goes through the same nine stages, from intake to the packing bench. It is dismantled, degreased, and cleaned of whatever forty or sixty years of dust and dried ink have left behind. Segment and type bars are freed. Escapement and carriage are adjusted. Rubber, ribbon, and spools are replaced where they need to be. Then it is put back together and typed on, line after line, until it behaves.

We keep the character. A machine that has been used for decades looks like it, and we would rather it did. What we will not send out is a typewriter that skips, sticks, or types crooked.

Sell, restore, rent

Most people find us because they want to buy a machine. We keep a working stock of several hundred, mostly Olivetti, Olympia, Hermes, Erika, Adler, Triumph and Remington, and we will tell you honestly which one suits the way you actually write rather than the one that photographs best.

We also service machines you already own, including ones bought elsewhere, and we source parts that are no longer made. Where an original part cannot be found, we print it.

And we rent. Film sets, weddings, launches, guest books, brand events. If you need twenty working typewriters in one room for one evening, that is a normal Tuesday here. 

The people who come to find us

The showroom is on a side street in Fuengirola, under a hanging bicycle and a sign that says there is no Wi-Fi. People come in meaning to look, sit down on the stairs, and leave two hours later with a machine and a story about their grandmother. We have stopped being surprised by it.

Made to suit you

Ribbon colour, a repaint, a keyboard layout in the language you write in, a case that closes properly. Much of what we do is adjusting a machine to one person. If you are not sure what you want, write to us before you order rather than after.

The machines we give away

People donate typewriters to us. Some arrive in good order, some arrive in a bin bag. We repair what can be repaired and pass those machines on, often to schools, so that a class gets to hear what a room full of typing sounds like. The rest we sell, and the money goes to animal shelters. None of this is a marketing programme. It is simply what we do with machines that come to us for free.

Where our machines have ended up

One of ours appears in Wes Anderson's Asteroid City. Others belong to Lady Gaga, Eddie Vedder and the writer Nico Walker. We have supplied events for Miu Miu, Sony Music and L'Oréal. We mention it because people ask, and then we go back to the bench.

El Granero in numbers

• Since 2013 Thirteen years of restoring manual typewriters in Andalusia.
• 5,000+ Machines restored and sent out from our workshop.
• 75+ Countries we have shipped to, across six continents.
• 500+ Typewriters in the workshop at any one time.
• 4.9 / 5 Average customer rating. Read the reviews.