11/26/2014

The Continued Slide of Antique Furniture


Fellow appraiser, Martha Peck, ISA AM sent me a good NY Times article from last month which I had missed on the state of the antique market.  Over the past few months I had posted several similar articles from the Wall Street Journal on declining value, and perhaps worse, declining interest for antique furniture. The article notes a regional English auction house claim that antique furniture used to represent 50% of its business, and now represents less than 20%.  I see that as well at US auction houses, where years ago, the auction houses were full of antique furniture, now it is still there, but prices are low and other sectors have taken a more meaningful roll. The article also notes the Antiques Collectors Club antique furniture index has been falling since 2002.

I hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving.

The NY Times reports
LONDON — “Hundred pounds? It’s no money at all. Eighty, then?”

The refrain — uttered by an auctioneer in Dorset, in the west of England — and others like it are being repeated in different accents, languages and currencies in any number of salesrooms around the world currently struggling to find a market for everyday antique furniture.

The lot in question, offered by the Dorchester auctioneer Duke’s on Sept. 25, was an English 18th-century oak lowboy — a deep-fronted side table with three drawers — estimated to fetch as much as 250 pounds, or about $405. Eventually a couple of bidders pitched in and this handsome, but not so fashionable piece was knocked down for a hammer price of £130, plus 22 percent in fees, to a woman in the sparsely attended salesroom.

“Fifteen years ago, antique furniture used to be about half our business. Now it’s less than 20 percent,” said Guy Schwinge, a partner at Duke’s, one of Britain’s most prominent regional salesrooms. “There’s been a shift in taste. People furnish homes in a more minimal way and they don’t do period schemes. Our lifestyles have changed.”

Mr. Schwinge pointed out that few people now had formal dining rooms, and this has affected the prices of period furniture. A set of seven Regency rosewood dining chairs sold for £317 with fees at Duke’s. People don’t read as many printed books as they used to, and they certainly don’t write many letters — hence the paltry £366 that went to an 18th-century mahogany bureau bookcase.

So the question on many collectors’ minds now is just how low can the price of period English furniture go? The British-based Antique Collectors’ Club’s Annual Furniture Index (AFI), based on a mix of auction and retail prices of 1,400 typical items, fell by 6 percent to 2,238 in 2013. The index has been on a slide for more than a decade after reaching a peak of 3,575 in 2002.

“For nice furnishing things, prices are as low as I can remember,” said Paul Beedham, an early oak specialist dealer in Derbyshire. “The professional classes who used to buy just don’t have the money any more. They’re struggling to pay their mortgages and car loans.”

But while prices for middle- and lower-range antique furniture might be at an all-time nadir, exceptional collector pieces can still sell for substantial sums. Mr. Beedham sold a 16th-century turned oak armchair associated with Queen Elizabeth I’s lord chief justice, Sir John Popham, to an American collector for between £40,000 and £50,000 at the LAPADA Art & Antiques Fair in London’s Berkeley Square, which closed on Sept. 28.

On Sept. 18, the Zurich auctioneers Koller sold a freshly discovered circa 1720 “bureau plat,” or writing desk, by the French cabinet maker André-Charles Boulle for 3 million Swiss francs with fees, or about $3.1 million, to a private collector based in London. The elaborately inlaid desk with gilt-bronze satyr-head mounts is similar to an example in the J. Paul Getty Museum in California, and had been kept in a Swiss castle for many generations. The price was the highest ever paid for a piece of furniture at an auction in Switzerland.

“The market went down after 9/11, and it’s really crashed for medium and lower level items,” said Philippe Perrin, director of the Paris-based furniture and art dealers Perrin Antiquaires, who had been hoping to buy the Boulle desk in Zurich. “We have to present things in a different way. I’ve learned from the contemporary art world that you need to show a piece on its own if it’s exceptional — and even if it’s not.”

Eighteenth-century pieces by named craftsmen such as Boulle have traditionally been the apogee of the antique furniture market. In March, Mr. Perrin presented a Louis XVI period mahogany and ormolu-mounted bureau plat by the revered maker Jean-Henri Riesener in isolation on his booth at the Tefaf fair in Maastricht, the Netherlands. The minimalism of the display seemed to pay off when the piece was bought for more than €1 million, or about $1.3 million, by the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

These prices might seem impressive enough, but they’re a shadow of the colossal sums that were paid 100 years ago during the heyday of “le goût Rothschild,” when millionaires’ drawing rooms in Mayfair and Manhattan were crammed with exquisite French rococo furniture and objects. In 1915, the London dealer Joseph Duveen paid the executors of John Pierpont Morgan £51,650, equivalent to about £5.2 million in today’s money, for a commode and secretaire by Riesener, according to Gerald Reitlinger’s “Economics of Taste” (1963). The following year, the National Gallery in Britain bought Masaccio’s early renaissance masterpiece, “Holy Family with Angels,” for £9,000.

Now furniture lags far behind art in both price and status. The most valuable piece of furniture sold at auction is still the 17th-century Florentine “Badminton Cabinet,” which raised £19 million, or $36.7 million, at Christie’s in London in 2004. There simply aren’t enough of the world’s multimillionaires and billionaires interested in museum-quality antique furniture to re-energize the market right now.

The reasons for the decline of this sector of collecting are complex, reflecting a mix of cultural, commercial and personal considerations.

“When I meet clients, nine out of 10 of them want to start again with new furniture,” said the London-based architect and interior designer Rabih Hage. “I have to persuade them to not get rid of their family pieces. They’re rejecting what their parents and grandparents had around them.” Mr. Hage said that his clients were also concerned about how antique furniture performed as an investment.

With good reason. Back at that Dorchester auction, swanky pieces of antique furniture that the Australian former newspaper proprietor James Fairfax had acquired from high-end London dealers in the 1990s were racking up sobering losses. For example, an 18th-century Italian laburnum desk he had bought for £33,000 in 1993 was knocked down for a hammer price of £11,000, before incurring seller’s charges.

Antique furniture might be relatively cheap at the moment, but it’s not offering much in the way of financial returns. This might be another reason why people are reluctant to spend a hundred on an 18th-century table — let alone 100 million.
Source:; The NY Times

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