Tempus fugit, and my tempus is particularly fugit, because what I used to dismiss as just old furniture has become antique. Using the 100 year rule- and what is good enough for US Customs and Immigration is good enough for me- a piece created in 1909 is now, officially, antique.
Mind you, plenty of this material still does look like used furniture, but some rather venerable names were producing phenomenal furniture in the first few decades of this century. It is worth bearing in mind that Francois Linke and Paul Sormani are 20th century furniture names whose evocations of 18th century French antiques are, in terms of quality, at least as fine as the originals.
Quality is everything, and whether newly conceived Arts and Crafts pieces from Morris and Company or revivalist pieces by a French workshop, it is not just age that determines venerability- and value. Morris and Company, as Linke and Sormani, were self-consciously producing quality pieces. William Morris had made it, quite literally, a piece of social and economic theory that, when left to their own devices, craftsmen working in vernacular styles and utilizing traditional materials and methods, would, out of the sheer joy of creation, produce pieces of enduring quality. Morris, along with fellow Fabian socialists including George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde, looked forward to an enlightened industrialism that enabled the working classes to achieve a dignity in their labor, along with a fair recompense. Sound familiar?
It is unfortunate that, at least in our experience, Morris is now known almost exclusively for the so-called ‘Morris chair’, an easy-armchair with an adjustable reclining back. A design not unique to Morris, it has nevertheless been applied to anything that roughly approximates the original model.
We seem to be in the midst of a revivalist episode as we speak, with interest in the English Regency period of roughly 1790 to 1830 spurred on by the Thomas Hope exhibition that originated at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Never really out of fashion, certainly on the coast the work of interior designers Tony Duquette and Billy Haines gave us the enduring phrase still favored by contemporary designers ‘Hollywood Regency.’ While we happily provide pieces of early 19th century furniture to festoon the Regency style villas of the 1930’s and late 1940’s that populate the landscape of Bel Air and Brentwood, the Regency revivalist movement of the second quarter of the last century saw the creation of carloads of reproduction furniture- some of it of pretty good quality, but most of it of the cheesiest order. It, too, will be, strictly speaking, ‘antique’ in a few decade’s time, but will it fall into the venerable category making it a worthy example of revivalism? Not likely. Save your cash for a good quality Regency piece.