Results: American Furniture at Chrisite's NY

Earlier this week Christie's held its Fall American Furniture, Folk Art and Decorative Arts sale.  I usually like to wait for the official press release, but given the sale was held on Wednesday the 28th and I am writing Friday afternoon, I guess as is sometimes the case, there will be no official word. 

Ahhh, I guess brown furniture is still not getting much respect. 

As I have no pre sale expectations, I had to glean what I could from some basic online information from the sales results page and from pre sale estimates and realized price sampling of the lots.

The sale offered 98 lots, with 80 selling for a respectable 81.6% buy through rate.  The sale totaled $4.49 million, with the top selling lot a paint decorated oak and cedar chamber table, Boston 1690-1710 (see image). It sold for $986,500 including buyers premium against a pre sale estimate of $100,000 to $150,000.  With this being the top lot, there were no lots above a million dollars, and the top ten ranged between $986,500 and $110,500.  The values quickly fell, with the eleventh highest lot selling at $58,750 with buyers premium (a Rococo Revival Meeks parlour suite), although it had a low estimate of $5K - $10k.

The good news is out of the top ten lots, 8 sold for above the pre sale high estimate, and many sold at multiples of the high estimate, the other two lots were within the pre sale estimates.  That, along with the low buy in rate shows there is value in the items in the sale and they are not being unreasonable priced.  I sampled about 20-25 additional lots beyond the top ten, looking to compare the realized price against the pre sale estimates.  I noted only about 4 which fell below the pre sale estimate, and many were not what I would consider the sales premium lots. For the rest of the sample lots, most fell between the estimates and two were above.