When asked to consider their relationship to other dealers in the industry, most antique furniture merchants will respond with one word: competition. Now of course this is a perfectly reasonable answer, and perfectly correct, but competitive rivalry doesn't exactly capture the nature of the business.

Yes, there is a bottom line—everyone wants to sell the best product at the best prices. In other industries, the resulting competition has seen the concentration of capital in a few hands, most notably in multinational corporations (i.e. our toothpaste comes from four companies, our cars from a dozen or so). In our industry, we have managed to reproduce the same model of horizontal integration, if only on a smaller scale. Nevertheless, just mentioning the phrase, "antique furniture," calls to mind the myriad of mom-and-pop jobs, small dealers and down-to-earth trade markets like Atlanta's own antique show.

Why is the antique business so decentralized? Because our industry is one that resists colonization by larger market forces. As Rockefeller once said (and I'm paraphrasing here), the age of the individual is over, having been replaced by globalized corporate identities—and yet, here we are. Perhaps this is because it is in the nature of antiques to resist change—after all, evading or enduring the countless number of catastrophic events that can beset a piece of furniture, only to emerge hundreds of years later as a beautifully patinated work of art is quite a feat. And of course there is the difficulty in reaping profits from said furniture.

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Anybody who knows antiques and the reproductions that follow them knows that familiarizing yourself with various furniture periods can be a big help. That's why we decided to offer our readers a few useful summaries of the major furniture periods of England, starting with one of the first. This post is the last in a series of 7, continued from a discussion of Victorian furniture.

The Edwardian period represents in many ways the last period of English furniture craftsmanship in which bench-made furniture pieces played a central role, with later styles of furniture more or less abandoning traditional precedents in favor of cheap materials and machine production. Today, only a handful of English furniture manufacturers continue the tradition preserved by Edwardian craftsmen, among them the third-generation cabinetmaker who supplies our own line of furniture.

So named for King Edward VII’s reign from 1901-1910, the Edwardian period continued the Victorian tradition of reviving and blending older styles. Georgian furniture inspirations occupied the forefront of Edwardian furniture-making, however, and thus the period produced a kind of neo-Georgian style, with key differences. Among these, for instance, was the revived prominence of Queen Anne style furniture, which tended to employ cabriole legs, serpentine curvatures in chests, and chair backs curved to fit the body, with walnut as a favourite wood type. The Art Nouveau style was also a contemporary of the Edwardian period.

Typically, Edwardian furniture-makers used mahogany, often in butterfly or quarter-veneer styles. Square tapered legs and spade feet were common. Satinwood was the favoured wood type for inlays, usually in combination with ebony. Satinwood inlay patterns included fan, swag, festoon, and string inlays. In fact, very often Edwardian furniture would include a combination of all of these inlays, producing a richly ornamented appearance, even in the absence of heavily worked carvings, and in this respect Edwardian craftsmen favoured the simple yet elegant Georgian approach to ornamentation.

We got a new container in two weeks ago but it was so full of great furniture that it is taking me this long to get some of them into a post. Enjoy!

I have to confess that when I began writing this post, it opened with grandiose assertions of our industry's incomparable singularity and linguistic wealth. I wanted to stake a claim, to mark out a small, fertile patch of our tongue as a special semiotic niche just for the business and subculture of English antique furniture. But every specialist can (justly) insist on his or her similarly unique verbiage, so I had to abandon that approach. Instead, what I found striking about the diction of English antiques lies in the relationship between the infrastructure (and superstructure) of our industry and the language that it employs.

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Anybody who knows antiques and the reproductions that follow them knows that familiarizing yourself with various furniture periods can be a big help. That's why we decided to offer our readers a few useful summaries of the major furniture periods of England, starting with one of the first. This post is the 6th in a series of 7, continued from a discussion of Regency furniture.

The same period that produced both an infamous Puritanical moralism as well as On the Origin of Species, the Victorian period is often seen as a time of contradictions, which any look at literature and art from the period can discern. The same can be said of Victorian furniture, where the stately propriety of the day clashed with human passions to produce some of the finest, well-crafted furniture pieces of all time. Today, Victorian furniture is often considered the epitomized combination of orderliness and rich ornamentation. Indeed, furniture-makers at the time were so successful that succeeding styles took inspiration from the Victorian period, and even today many of the finest furniture styles (including our own collection) owe their design and construction techniques to the master craftsmen of Victorian period furniture.

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