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IKEA Offers to Furnish $2.7 Million Home

Posted by Chris under Industry News on September 22, 2009

So I know it seems sometimes that I just love to pick on IKEA (and maybe I do), but when I ran across this article, I just had to share it. The skinniest house in New York—more history here—which runs at 9.5' x 42', was built in 1873 and once housed Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, is up for sale at $2.7 mil. And who steps in to offer to furnish the place for up to $10,000? The laminate name that shines with the gloss of new and vibrant disposable furniture.

There is a great irony in furnishing a multimillion dollar home with furniture designed for dorm rooms. Everyone I know who lived off of IKEA furniture in college spent those four or so years gradually replacing each piece with better finds at thrift stores and antique shops. Of course, as with everything, there are exceptions, and so IKEA does beef up their line with somewhat higher quality items, but even so—$2.7 million? Maybe I just don't get it down here in the Deep South of Atlanta, where we take low real estate prices and large spaces for granted.

Still, what can be more space-saving than a secretary bookcase combination or, for that matter, the ever-useful pembroke table? The English, who have historically had smaller living spaces than their expansive cousins over the pond, have specialized in space-saving cabinetry for hundreds of years. In fact, many of IKEA's designs, which sometimes present themselves with an air of ingeniously patented innovation, are simply borrowed from Old World cabinetmakers.

So if the buyers of this unique home have the taste (and the wallet) to purchase a charming, historical property, I really can't see them letting IKEA's designers have their way with the place. Who knows—maybe they'll shop at English Classics?

Tags: ikea, new york, house

2 comments.

Putto or Cherub?

Posted by Chris under Furniture Commentary on September 12, 2009

This isn't the type of question I ask very often, but a post about a Thomas Brooks Dresser over at Rare Victorian peaked my interest. John Werry raised the issue of whether the winged male child, shown at the top of this dresser as well as in countless other works of furniture and art, ought to be referred to as a "putti" (singular for "putto") or as a "cherub."

According to Wikipedia's version of the story, "cherub" cannot refer to the artistic representation of toddler angels, a claim for which Wikipedia provides no support in that article but does in another on putto. I use the term "support" loosely, since the reference does not appear to be academic or peer-reviewed; in any case, a forum poster known as Juan Carlos Martinez argues that "cherub" refers exclusively to the Christian theological figures, and that putto are only secularized versions of Cupid—and thus obviously not Christian (see the rest of his argument). Not wanting to leave the question unanswered, I did what I always do in any contest of English diction: I consulted the Oxford English Dictionary (which unfortunately requires a subscription to access).

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Tags: putto, cherub, oed, thomas brooks, rare victorian

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Divided We Fall? The Shared Plight of Antique Dealers

Posted by Chris under Furniture Commentary on September 03, 2009

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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Tags: dealers, industry

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Edwardian Furniture (1901-1910)

Posted by Chris under Furniture Commentary on August 28, 2009

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.

Tags: furniture, history, edwardian

2 comments.

August Furniture Container

Posted by Chris under Company News on August 21, 2009

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!

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It's pretty common to get one or two antique pub tables in on a container but this one is a bit larger than most at 3.5' x 6' when opened.

The quartersawn oak card table shown here has three drawers and dates back to the Victorian period (around 1890), and retains all original components.

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Tags: container, arrivals, table, cabinet, wardrobe

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Plying the Antique Lexicon

Posted by Chris under Furniture Commentary on August 13, 2009

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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Tags: furniture, terms

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Victorian Furniture (1837-1901)

Posted by Chris under Furniture Commentary on August 06, 2009

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 a clamor of 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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Tags: furniture, history, victorian

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Photoshop & Furniture: For Good or Ill

Posted by Chris under Furniture Commentary on August 04, 2009

If you're a small, enterprising antique dealer like us, you might do your own photography. For our part, we've devoted a small section of our warehouse to an enclosed photo studio with a light set and a computer with Photoshop CS3. Now I'm no PS guru but this is one of those programs that have changed the world, if only in small ways. As for furniture, the advantage of having good-looking pictures is that most antique dealers don't. This always surprises me because beautiful pictures can make or break a sale, especially since many people can be uneasy about buying online without first seeing the item in person. The trick is to show how beautiful your item is without hiding its flaws (if any), and to refrain from performing a Photoshop face lift.

Consider the following photos of a walnut writing desk that we have. Taken with a Canon Rebel XT, an 18-55mm lens and an Hoya polarizer, the left photo has no post-processing at all. The middle has what I would consider the most honest appearance, although I would consider the right most beautiful.

If I were making this photo for our furniture catalog, then I would choose the right photo (because we can make a desk to match the photo). But if this picture was slated for a listing for this particular desk, then I would use the more representative middle picture because I don't want to mislead my buyer into thinking that the walnut has that deeper, more saturated color with more shading and darker tones. This becomes particularly important when shipping furniture from our Atlanta showroom to, say, California, because on top of wanting to please my customer, I don't want to pay for return shipping.

So if you're considering using Photoshop to tighten up your furniture pictures but you find yourself uneasy about the reputation that Photoshop has of creating beautiful illusions, then just keep in mind what you want your buyer to see, and make it happen.

Tags: photoshop, writing desk

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The Future of Antiques: circa 2000 IKEA Desk?

Posted by Chris under Furniture Commentary on July 28, 2009

That's right: this here is a genuine IKEA tin desk machine-crafted around Y2K, about 20 years before WWIII. It is only one of 900 copies surviving from the original batch of 85,000...

Is this the future of antiques? I confess to actually running these kinds of narratives through my mind as I try to grasp what tomorrow's furniture world will be like. How long can our current pool of antiques last? Eventually, I suppose they will all break, rust, shatter or otherwise vanish into the thin air of history until the last remaining specimens become an endangered species of craftsmanship. So if we aren't producing new quality furniture, we are doomed to run out.

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Tags: furniture, philip k. dick, IKEA

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Regency Furniture (1800-1830)

Posted by Chris under Furniture Commentary on July 21, 2009

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 5th in a series of 7, continued from a discussion of Georgian furniture.

Regency furniture developed in the latter decades of the Georgian period, and represented the culmination of neoclassical design. While the years previous to the 19th century saw simpler furniture designs and less rich ornamentation, Regency furniture featured the development of embellished adornment and extravagance, thus anticipating the exoticism of Victorian furniture. Regency furniture grew so popular across the Atlantic that Americans adopted their own version, known as Federal style furniture, which lingered on a few decades after Regency styles fell out of favour in England.

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Tags: furniture, history, regency, george iv, georgian, empire

4 comments.