I received a telephone call yesterday from the daughter of a good client of ours. Her father had built her a house- he’s a home builder and property developer- and she’s trying to finish the inside off with a few period pieces. Well, where better a place to come than Chappell & McCullar? With all that, though, when inquiring if her father would be with her, she gleefully told me he was in London, then off to Paris, where he had taken his two granddaughters for an early summer outing. What a shame…
If you’ve not read the newspaper, accessed the internet, or watched television in the past 2 years, perhaps you don’t know about the perilous state of the residential housing market in this country. Frankly, if you are a San Franciscan, you could be excused for not knowing, as prices continue to escalate- and I mean sharply. Our builder-developer cum European traveler client, however, is in a market that is, shall we say, not so brisk. Even so, a tough year comes on the heels of the best years he’s ever had, so he’s still able to afford a suite of rooms at a hotel in the Place Vendome- sorry, Mr. Al-Fayed- not the Ritz. As well, he had enough scratch to ring me up and inquire about antiques galleries sufficiently near at hand that he can walk to them while he’s taking a respite from his giggly granddaughters. Sounds sexist, but what normal, healthy fourteen year old girls are not giggly?
My good friend and Paris-based colleague Ulrich Leben had one or two suggestions, but the best was the venerable Left Bank dealer Galerie J. Kugel. This, of course, is the kind of dealer I dream of becoming. A fantastic array of mainly 18th century pieces of all types, from furniture to paintings, housed in an exquisite hotel particulier. In my next life, I guess. Not so far fetched, that expression- Galerie J. Kugel has been trading in one form or another for 200 years.
In conversation, Ulrich confirmed, as our man on the ground in Paris, that, overall, the French antiques and fine art trade- and yes, this includes mid-century Modern material- is not all that brisk. Still, with the likes of Kugel still carrying on, like my builder-developer client who will visit them today, somebody must have made some money somewhere. And still have some money to spend.
And it is being spent, in the galleries and in the auction houses. I mentioned in passing yesterday, or was it the day before?, about record prices for brown furniture- yes, you heard me right, brown furniture, at Christie’s in London. Sexy brown furniture, and, yes, there is such a thing, from Simon Sainsbury’s collection, and, on the same day, a small, multiple-owner consignment of 12 extraordinary pieces. Given the anticipation associated with last summer’s sale-that-didn’t happen of the Chippendale pieces from Dumfries House, perhaps it is no surprise that a Chippendale giltwood and padouk chinoiserie cabinet, 
not unlike a bookcase that remains at Dumfries, sold for a record £2,400,000- a record for English furniture. In fact, the sales on the day were well in excess of £20,000,000. Unfortunately, the immediate effect of this sale, or at least its timing, was that it functioned to siphon off sales activity from the fair at Grosvenor House. The dealers at Grosvenor House, in the main, did not do so well this year, but one wonders about the possible outcome of the fair had the Sainsbury sale not competed with it. With the preponderance of the auction buyers consisting of collectors or dealers bidding on behalf of collectors, the Grosvenor House dealers need to take heart- there are plenty of buyers out there, willing and able to spend a lot of money.