A 53 year-old furniture shop is to cease trading months after its well-storied owner died.

At the end of September Geoffrey Drayton Modern Furniture on Epping High Road will shut its doors for a final time following a clearance sale.

The departure of one of the town’s best known and regarded shops comes in the wake of Geoffrey Drayton’s death at the age of 85.

Equipped with a strong belief in his sense of style and a desire to make beautiful an austere, post-war Britain, Mr Drayton’s career began in Walthamstow in 1963, when he filled a Tudor house with pendant lights and a Terence Conran table, and introduced the area to modern furniture.

Three years later he took advantage of an auction and moved to Epping where he set up shop in an old dairy building.

“The auction was apparently under-attended due to snowy conditions, so he was uncontested at the sale, and ended up owning a building for which he had no arranged money, a state he was to become familiar with over the years,” explained son Guy Drayton, who now runs the family business.

“His business plan often amounted to ‘something will turn up’.

“It usually did.”

Despite having no formal training and a background in the largely unrelated fields of washing machines sales and painting road markings, Mr Drayton set about fitting the Grade II listed shop with large windows and filling it with furniture collected from fairs in Cologne, Milan and Copenhagen.

A steady trade and growing reputation was only slightly hampered in 1987, when a fire ripped through the shop.

“A lot of the furniture had to be chucked out or sold cheap, but he was not at all sad,” Guy said.

“For him it was a project. He loved it really.

“It gave him a chance to redo the shop, to make it beautiful.”

As he did Mr Drayton looked to expand the business into London, taking on a vast 5,000sq/ft premise in Tobacco Docks and subsequently moving to Hampstead Road in Euston four years later when the rent free period elapsed.

Disaster struck once more in 2009 when a burst water-main flooded the London shop, leading to an insurance claim of £80,000 and beginning what would be the business’s retreat from the capital four years later.

While the fortunes of his boutique brand rose and fell, Mr Drayton remained an eccentric and well known character.

Some may remember his dog which ran from the family home to the furniture shop along Epping High Road, unattended, and others may recall how he was banned from The Swan Chinese purportedly for asking what the soup of the day was.

He also had a penchant for sleeping outside, once bedding down in a sleeping bag outside an Italian furniture convention and also on the side of Mont Blanc beneath the rotted remains of an emergency thermal blanket.

A love of climbing discovered in middle age landed Mr Drayton on the front page of what was then the Epping Gazette when he fell a considerable height off Ben Nevis, only to limp away with a mere broken leg.

Another not-so-near brush with mountain based calamity had him shoo away an unwanted rescue helicopter.

His force of character, energy and self-belief were not enough to stem the increasing flow of trade from the high street to the internet or reverse his business’s fortunes however, which began to falter after the 2008 financial crash.

He died in April having survived his long-term partner Gill and leaving behind his ex-wife Judy Redfern and four children.

The decision was taken to close the shop’s doors one final time on September 29 following Mr Drayton’s death.

The sale starts on September 14.