Furniture Commentary

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

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How to Tell the Difference Between Wood Types

Posted by Chris under Furniture Commentary on July 15, 2009

A friend of mine asked me the other day about how I distinguish different wood types. Now, I only regularly deal with a limited selection of wood types, but there are two basic facts that you need to know.

1. The first, most important thing I could say on the subject is this: there is no such thing as a "cherry finish" (to name the most popular example). This is a misnomer invented for the convenience of cheap synthetic veneers made to look like cherry (or any other wood type), and the term has simply become so popular that it has come to incorrectly apply to real and imitation cherry alike. Finishing is the process of staining and coating applied to a wood.

2. The way to identify wood is by its grain—not by its color. There is, again, no such thing as a "cherry color." Before staining, nearly all wood simply looks, in color at least, like the normal timber you'll find at any hardware store. This is why you will find, for example, oak furniture that is very light, or orange, or even black (as when it is ebonized). Some woods, however, tend to be a certain color, like yew, which tends to be orange-ish, and all woods take differently to different stains. However, the rule still stands: you identify wood by its grain.

It is difficult to explain what each grain looks like, but it is easy to show with pictures. Just see the following. (Click on the pictures for larger sizes.)

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Tags: furniture, tips, wood

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History, or, Batman Likes Antiques

Posted by Chris under Furniture Commentary on July 09, 2009

In a recent blog post for Antiques Avenue, a UK seller of vintage jewellery, I discussed the particular appeal of antique furniture, but afterward I found myself wondering about antiques in general. What is the nature of our attraction to all things old? Obviously I could cite quality, but I'm not sure that accounts for the charm that antiques hold over us. In the case of vintage antiques¹, many of us who were there are still around, so it makes sense that some Baby Boomers would have a taste for the styles of their youth. Still, vintage and retro pop aesthetics have no problem thriving in today’s young community (think of the hipster clothing craze, or the continued popularity of retro adverts). So what gives?



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Tags: Frederic Jameson, retro, vintage, batman, wwii propaganda

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On the Eve of Our Independence

Posted by Chris under Furniture Commentary on July 03, 2009

Tomorrow is the 233rd anniversary of our independence here in the U.S. I find it a great irony that I am writing about it here, since, after all, our furniture is English. Every now and then, we get a piece from around the time of the American Revolution, and I can't help but wonder what the original owner must have thought about the events on our side of the pond.

I suppose these kinds of thoughts are part of what make antiques so charming to us. After all, owning a piece of furniture from the late 18th century does have a certain appeal for some of us Yankees; the idea of it exerts a nameless pull over the psyche, as if we have opened a back door somewhere to let the other side in. History that has passed long ago allows us to think this kind of thing without any of the animosity that now seems alien and unimaginable to us, absurd even, given our close ties to Great Britain. Still, having a piece of the past in the same room with you has a way of reviving history, of bringing it closer to you in a way that enriches meaning.

And so we arrive in the present. What would yesterday's ghosts think of our world? Or tomorrow's? I sometimes fear that the disposable nature of our furniture and other belongings will render our zeitgeist so ephemeral and abstract that all we will leave behind is some sort of vague, cyberspatial imprint that will seem irrelevant to the worldview of the future. Either way, barring some disaster of extraordinary scale, antiques that were there to see the first Independence Day will still be around, like visitors from the past, waving perpetually.

Tags: july 4 2009, american revolution, 18th century

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Georgian Furniture (1714-1820)

Posted by Chris under Furniture Commentary on July 01, 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 4th in a series of 7, continued from a discussion of Queen Anne furniture.

Such was the rich, compelling character of Georgian period art and design that most English reproduction office furniture today is modeled directly after Georgian style examples. In fact, our office furniture collection owes virtually all of its designs and many of its construction techniques to the efforts of the master craftsmen of the Georgian and Victorian periods.

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Tags: furniture, history, georgian

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Queen Anne Furniture (1702-1714)

Posted by Chris under Furniture Commentary on June 23, 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 3rd in a series of 7, continued from a discussion of Jacobean furniture.

Remembered most for its recurrence near the end of the 19th century in the Queen Anne Revival (c1870-c1900), Queen Anne period furniture marks an important turn in English furniture history. Like many other aspects of English culture, Queen Anne style furniture grew quite popular in America, particularly during the Revival period just after the American Federal style tapered off. Although usually characterized by stylistic developments, this time also saw the introduction of mahogany into English furniture-making, which would become quite popular later in the 18th century.

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Tags: furniture, history, queen anne

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