Author: Michael Chappell

We’ve just returned from a few days in Hawaii. We consider Oahu our second home and where, in the fullness of time, we intend to make our primary residence. My first trip to Hawaii in May, 1976, was for a job in the banking business. Had not a greater power been guiding my destiny, I wouldn’t have traveled there, but in the intervening 36 years I’ve taken every opportunity to express my thanks for this fortunate event.

Over the course of those years, there have clearly been changes the most profound of which seem singularly contradictory. The growth in real estate development- and a visit to the forest of high rises that is Honolulu is testimony to this- is contrasted with the marked growth and appreciation of endemic, traditional Hawaiian culture, and its concomitant and often expressed respect for the land. Tragically, Hawaii’s strategic geographic position made it, since its discovery, a coveted possession by governments in both Europe and America. That it was a crossroads, as well as grappling for political hegemony, made an inordinate number of people aware of its beauty and it inexorably became the nexus of global mass tourism.

In spite of all this, its natural charm has survived pretty well, as well as the spirit of aloha maintained by its resident population. This last week, we enjoyed a morning’s hike to Manoa Falls, astonishing in its verdant beauty, and all the more so given its position in the Koolaus so close to the teeming population of Honolulu. Once there, we found the pool at the base of the fall predominated by a gentleman of a certain age and his blowsy girlfriend, who had stripped off and were intent on taking photos of one another. To say that this was inconstant with the natural setting is an understatement. Let’s say that this jarring mise en scene scared the birds away. While Keith and I stood there palely loitering, averting our eyes and hoping to outwait the lady and gentleman, we were joined by another couple who had hiked up with their two mid-teen daughters. The second gentleman, while not absolutely appalled, was nevertheless irritated by the way two others exhibited such an uncomprehendingly dominating presence, and he shouted out to them ‘How long are you going to be?’ To which the stripped off man replied ‘Come on in- there’s plenty of room.’

Really? Thank goodness not all of us think the natural world is a mere backdrop automatically trumped when graced by our presence. I suppose that, once upon a time not so very long ago, the preponderance of the natural world and an abundance that seemed inexhaustible made our exploitation of it seem incidental, when it was considered at all. Still and all, in Hawaii with both its limited land area and strongly rooted tradition of respect for the natural world makes its exploitation seem at best schizy and it has wrought some bizarre effects.

This may come as a surprise to my gentle readers who have visited there, but that intense enclave of the built environment that Waikiki has become was historically one of the most hallowed places anywhere, the precinct of kings and shrines that in their number would rival the Acropolis. My beloved Royal Hawaiian Hotel takes its name from the royal cocoanut grove, vestiges of which remain in the hotel grounds, enjoyed by the Hawaiian ali’i from the earliest days. The grove and its precinct were named Helumoa. Favored with ample fresh water naturally drained from the Manoa and Palolo valleys a few miles inland, Waikiki, and the area of Helumoa specifically was replete with abundant natural beauty and food stocks from taro patches and fish ponds. Nothing of this remains, with the area drained with the construction of the Ala Wai Canal in the 1920’s, and the spoils from the canal used as fill aiding a construction boom in Waikiki that has yet to abate.  Sacred sites known as heiau were dismantled. One of the most revered was only recently rediscovered when its topside development as a bowling alley was demolished, revealing the sacred alter of Kapaemahu underneath, incorporated into the building’s foundation.

In this age of 9 figure art sales, it surprises me that we still have occasional price resistance in our substantially less vaunted, but still respectable, sphere. Even our more astute clients will ask us, from time to time, if they’ll be able to get their money out of a purchase made from us. Of course, I can’t guarantee that any more than the salesrooms can about the work of Munch or Rothko or Cezanne. With all that, I’d assume that a money good purchase for, say, $125,000,000 would be of greater concern than a $12,000 Pembroke table, n’est-ce pas?

While none of us could guarantee the future value of anything- even cash- I will venture out on a fairly sturdy limb and promise that, when it comes time to sell the furniture purchased from one of the prominently advertising pseudo-chic chains, the value will be less than that for an equivalent avoirdupois of firewood. It mystifies me why and how the ability to purchase a roomful of strictly color and style coordinated cack so captivates prospective punters.

With all that, despite the prospect of getting better value from any member of the accredited antiques trade, making a purchase of a period article does have aspects that tend to, if not perplex, than to give the first time buyer a degree of pause. For example, using my favored exemplary Pembroke tables, we always have several on the floor. Always good representatives of what they are, but at varying prices. This sometimes begs question, as we would expect it might, and we cheerfully explain that it has everything to do with quality, condition, and rarity. We have a pretty good quality early 19^th century example that is fairly priced at $2,500  but near at hand is an earlier example for $12,000. When one understands that the earlier piece, when new, represented a ground breaking design, that it is possessed of its original leather-wheeled casters, and has solid matched timbers to its top and leaves, the pricing difference is a bit easier to understand.

For us, and those dealers who survive in business, pricing is critical and, unless one wants to pursue this business as an expensive hobby, everything needs to be priced to sell. The dealer who upon pricing an acquisition using some kind of keystone formula with no consideration of reasonableness is what we would term in the trade ‘now defunct.’

With some frequency, we’ll get calls from people wanting our counsel on the restoration of a furniture item. That’s actually an overstatement. If the queries could be boiled down to one simple inquiry, it is ‘Could you recommend a good restorer?’ The answer we provide, invariably, is an equivocal one- yes, we know lots of good restorers, but no, we can’t recommend one.

The why of this may mark us as inordinately cautious, but as with physicians, our aim is to do no harm. While we might in the short term satisfy an inquiry with a recommendation, we would rather risk an immediate disappointment by declining to provide information than risk the possibility of a larger one when the restored piece fails to satisfy the punter.

The simple truth is, ‘restoration’ in the antiques trade is at best an amorphous term. There exists no standard protocol, so what is meant, and in fact what we mean when we discuss restoration in describing our own stock varies with virtually every piece of furniture or period artwork we’ve ever handled- and the accomplishment of the restoration is always preceded by a considerable amount of palaver with the restorer(s). We have a number of people who work for us on projects, but the young man who is primarily responsible for putting our furniture pieces in good nick is a graduate cabinet maker, trained at the North Bennett Street School in Boston. He’s a talented carver, wood turner, and can do pretty fair marquetry. That said, we have never, ever just turned him loose on a project, nor would he want us to. As with my meeting with him this morning, we had to discuss the level of distress on a table top, whether to leave it as is or to ameliorate it, and if so, how much.

Our overriding restoration principle on period pieces is just enough to make it visually appealing, but not so much to occlude its age. Easy to say, but hard to accomplish given the myriad circumstances- with at least one new one arising with each piece we acquire- that make a standardized restoration regimen impossible.

Always a little slow on the uptake, it is then not surprising that I continue to be surprised by the amount of sales activity we enjoy the result of our website. With the establishment and the proliferation of online sales platforms, it had originally seemed to me that these were designed for the sale of shall we say cheap and cheerful items of limited antiquity. Consequently, it appeared that successes were achieved mostly with that darling of contemporary design, mid-century modern furniture, and items of no great age that would be produced in multiples. With the dealers with whom we have a good relationship (read ‘those who will actually tell the truth’) it is the general consensus that, while an occasional better sale might be achieved utilizing a sales platform, it is mostly for the sale of what we refer to as price point merchandise.

With a consistent lukewarm response from peers, we’ve relied on our own website and seen, for a few years, roughly the same result- the occasional spot sale, usually for not very much money. What we have seen ongoing, though, is the phenomenon of any actual darkening of the gallery door preceded by a browse on our website. This, coupled with follow-on sales through our website related to an initial gallery visit has made our website a useful tool. While the virtual hasn’t replaced the actual, our website has, in the ten years we’ve maintained it, consistently been an excellent adjunct to our bricks and mortar.

That is, until recently. Markedly over the course of the last year, we are achieving a significant and growing proportion of our sales from website activity unaccompanied by an in-store visit. We always assume that the buyer of traditional material will continue to utilize a traditional method of making a purchase, with four if not five of the senses- not all of them internet accessible- informing the punter’s decision to buy.

In all this, I am reminded of a phenomenon of the ‘60’s, with the American public, largely unused to wine, suddenly exposed to it in greater volume. While it was assumed that the glass of tawny port consumed at Christmas had irrevocably shaped the American palate, sage oenophiles knew that consumers would over time achieve a comfortability with more sophisticated wines. The fortunes of the wine industry in California have certainly borne this out. Similarly, it seems that the internet has exposed so many prospective buyers to art and antiques that, over time, the purchase of items of increasingly better quality using the same method with which their exposure is ineluctably linked appears now to be a natural adjunct.

Though we had assumed that the nature of our internet sales would inevitably be dry and arid, as opposed to the intimate conviviality of our face to face client relationships, we’ve found that the internet is anymore the growing entre to interaction that is just as rewarding as before. Moreover, whatever it is that disposes a client to establish a relationship with a particular dealer seems, for Chappell & McCullar at any rate, to transcend our galleries, somehow infusing our website and those who browse it. I am possibly penning this blog entry too late, as we’ve renewed our lease and we’ll be ‘actual’ for a few more years yet. I suppose I might have got better terms from our landlord had this blog entry appeared a few weeks ago. Still and all, we cannot deny that in the fullness of time the virtual may make the actual gallery if not obsolete then the adjunct that the internet was formerly- even in what we have always steadfastly maintained is the highest of high touch businesses.