Author: Michael Chappell

From what I read, a factor driving the current stock market rally is the spike since the first of the year in home sales- both new and existing. One pundit was quoted as saying that more homes turned over because of ‘aggressive’ (his term) seller pricing.

Well, gee…given how explosively housing prices had appreciated between 2001 and 2007, is it any wonder that some significant moderation has occurred? Simplistic, of course, but we’ve all seen bull real estate markets that are then followed by some correction. I’ve seen four- 1982, 1990, 2001, and now.  With all that, within sight of San Francisco- still a strong market- the desirable, close-in, built-out areas are holding steady or appreciating. The remote areas- by which I mean green-field developments, beyond public transportation, services, and anything other than basic infrastructure- are still suffering, but not as much as they were. Granted, the median home price locally is declining, but this has more to do with the fact that it is mostly relatively inexpensive homes that are on the market, naturally skewing the median price downward. My good friend and San Francisco residential real estate guru Greg Normart tells me that, for better residential properties he has many more buyers than he has sellers. The why of this, too, is simple- those better heeled sellers in the 7 and 8 figure properties are not, in the main, of a mind to sell possibly for less than they might wish in what is touted as a slow market.

When expensive homes are either being built or trading hands in fairly large numbers, we see our business, if not burgeon, at least expand. The first thing that starts to move in our regular stock of English antiques is dining room furniture- dining tables, sets of dining chairs, and sideboards. Although our craftspeople have told us that their clients tend to ease into projects with an increasing number of small orders, ours go what appears whole hog. Conversely, when fewer large houses are trading hands, it is the accent pieces- small tables, mirrors, object d’art- that sell.

Stay tuned, then- we’ll alert you to the running of the dining tables.

Another opus from Jack Tremper

Working in a high-end English antiques gallery is unique.  It’s like many other places in that we have work stations complete with computers and even a water cooler in the back, but instead of a cubicle we are instead surrounded by rare and costly pieces of furniture and works of art.  I remember remarking to a friend once that I felt as if I were working in a museum.  In some ways we are like a museum, except that all of our pieces are for sale.

Thankfully, this thinking soon disappeared as I became more comfortable in the showroom and less worried about knocking something over while vacuuming or scratching a piece while dusting.  Not to mention, the near daily saying by Mr. Chappell of “this isn’t a museum” in response to some less-engaged browsers (‘looky-lous’ as we call them) coming through the gallery reminds me that everything is for sale and if the gallery were a museum, we’d surely charge an admission fee.

In saying this, I’ve come to realize it’s a terrible idea to look at period furniture only as historical items or pieces to admire.  We certainly have many things that are undoubtedly museum-quality, but the pieces that we deal in are far more than nice looking old furniture; they are practical pieces that were created to be used.  If it’s a chair – sit in it.  If it’s a table – work, eat, or, at the very least display something on it.

Through a few interactions with clients, it’s become evident that I’m not the only one adjusting away from a “museum” mentality.  I have seen numerous clients or potential clients hesitate before sitting down in our pair of giltwood George III John Linnell salon chairs.  It’s not just me noticing the hesitation in their body language, but they actually ask if it is alright to sit in these chairs.  And of course we let them know that it is fine that they sit in them and in fact we encourage it.

Sitting in these chairs helps to see that they are not just for decoration or collecting, but they actually are quite comfortable to sit in.  I don’t know if our visitors find it surprising that these chairs are reasonably comfortable but they shouldn’t because the chairs were made with the intention of being sat on and I’d hope our clients see this aspect as well as continue to enjoy how they look.

Though, I suppose, the idea of sitting in one of a pair of chairs with a price of $88,000 takes some getting used to but the fact of the matter is that a chair is for sitting.  And an antique chair is for both sitting and admiring.

MSN has a news story online this morning citing various idiosyncratic measures of economic recovery. Given last year’s crash that caught even Warren Buffet unawares, these grass-roots gauges- including spikes in expensive cupcake sales- are as valid as a measure of economic strength, or continued doldrums, as anything else.

Even we have some measures that we use to gauge, if not overall economic performance, than at least what our own business portends. No one will be surprised to learn that we track hits on our website very carefully. What might come as a surprise, however, is that we don’t find any connection between an overall spike in site hits and a spike in sales. What we find more significant is when during the week that we have site hits. For instance, if we see quite a disproportionate amount of our internet activity occurring on the weekends, we believe that it is people surfing with no particular objective in mind, beyond general interest. Oddly, we engender our greatest number of website-related inquiries during this time- my Monday morning is given over to responding to these- but our rate of sales based on weekend inquiries is quite low. If, on the other hand, our site hits are greater during the working week, we find that this generates a significant amount of business both from private clients and interior designers. Moreover, we find that browsers with money to spend also take the time to browse during the week- not at the weekend. This certainly makes sense considering interior designers: their legwork, including all shopping trips, even to virtual shops on the internet, occurs during weekdays. Evenings and particularly weekends are very often given over to client meetings. While increases in our site traffic during the week don’t always translate into more internet inquiries during the week, we always find that actual visits to our galleries increase. When we inquire of new visitors to our galleries, they with nearly 100% frequency tell us that they visited our site precedent to an actual gallery visit.

While the maintenance of our website- and maintenance of placement on the major search engines- is important to us, the most telling indication portending good sales is actual gallery visits. We log in every single gallery visitor- who they were, what they were interested in, price quotes- absolutely everything germane to the visit, even, if appropriate, what they were wearing. Call me old fashioned, but while coiffure may not signify, jewelry and handbags do. For the gentlemen, Prada loafers don’t mean much, but we can always spot a DAKS jacket. This is probably our most important internal management tool, with our gallery log a record of subsequent activity. It is accessible for review and data entry by all gallery staff, with each week maintained as a separate document in 12 point type. When our Weekly Report extends to in excess of 3 full pages, we know some good sales are likely to follow. Although typically the longer the report indicates that we have had more gallery visitors, this is not always so. Occasionally the report can run long because we’ve had some pretty heavy-duty gallery visits- lots of interest in lots of items. So, rather than just a measure of gallery visitors, the length of the report reflects the earnest nature of those visits.

Much more palaver on this subject and I then will begin to give away proprietary information. Suffice to say these are informal measures, but things we take seriously. Moreover, while Wall Street and the other money centers are the big stage upon which economic dramas are publically played out, the larger economic engine is one that employs every individual consumer and every business, even small ones like ours. We firmly believe that when we can sense economic trends as well as anyone can. The one thing we know for sure, amidst all this, is that when the news media reports on any trend, it is, in this age of information, already old news.

It’s not often in this business someone’s asked me for a knockoff. As I think about, it has never, in our ever-lengthening tenure that such a thing has occurred. What has happened, however, is our having to break the news to a client that something they purchased in good faith as the genuine article was, in fact, not. Fortunately, no such item that I was ever called on to evaluate has been anything that cost the client a lot of money. The client, after some mutterings, has invariably chosen to take having been taken on the chin. It has often seemed to me, therefore, that this is why customers of online sales platforms do not rise up en masse. For us, the silver lining is that a number of these sadder but wiser buyers will then eschew auctions- whether virtual or actual- altogether, and give their trade, if it is antiques they are after, to a proper antiques dealer.

Though erstwhile buyers have not arisen as a class seeking redress, legal action on the part of luxury goods manufacturers, knockoffs of whose branded merchandise is sold with apparent impunity in online auctions, proceeds apace. Online sites have maintained that it is the responsibility of the luxury goods manufacturers themselves to police their brands. Oddly, some courts have agreed with them, but some have not. The luxury goods manufacturers claim, reasonably enough, that the auction sites, collecting as they do a sales commission on the sale of knockoffs, are therefore culpable.

One of our many memories of foreign travel is one that occurred very early on, when a group of us visited China, Hong Kong and Korea. While Keith and I spent our time trying to suss out Asian antiques, some in our party were keen to find ‘deals’ on knockoff merchandise. Upon returning to San Francisco and making our way through US Customs, the customs officers gleefully confiscated every bit of knockoff merchandise our friends’ brought in. I would venture to say that all of my 20 or so devoted readers have at least one similar tale to tell. Moreover, for how long can a retail establishment operate selling knockoffs before it’s shut down? Why, therefore, does our otherwise vigilant government allow the open and public sale of knockoff merchandise in another forum when it is otherwise so vigorously sanctioned?

It is this general inconsistency that is being pursued in courts here and abroad that, I hope forces online sites to maintain the same level of diligence and integrity that are required of the rest of us. Not to sound pompous (Keith tells me I always do, but given my farm background, I consider myself down to earth) but integrity is our stock in trade. Dollars may be the thing that makes the difference, with the high number of smallish transactions involving knockoff goods perhaps making it impractical for law enforcement to do anything about them. But given the whopping size of the largest of the online platforms, it might be that they have a larger legal war chest with which to fight- derived at least in part, ironically, from the sale of knockoff merchandise.

Some very recent mention has been made in the antiques and art press about the participation of a particular New York dealer in one of the better London shows. That this dealer and his estranged brother, also a dealer, have scandalized the trade recently, caught selling shall we say ‘dollied up’ pieces, seems to have been forgotten.

Preaching a Jeremiah about the evil-doers in the trade is not the point of this blog entry, however. The recent press got me to thinking about the confections these gentlemen were marketing. They knew their market, of course, interior designers who are always looking for something outré as an accent piece. And why not? Distinctive design is what interior designers are paid to deliver. That they were duped by a nefarious antiques dealer does not, to my mind, make the designers who patronized them culpable.

As an antiques dealer who, while happy to cater to interior designers and goodness knows we have some excellent designers with whom we trade, tends to have a deeper affinity for private collectors, we tend to offer goods that are possibly a bit more conservative. Quality, yes, but not over the top. Frankly, if something is dramatically out of pattern for a particular historical period, we are immediately suspicious, unless it has some documentary support. This is certainly true for English antique pieces, given the wealth of information- original invoices, inventories, valuations- that survives in the records of the great landed estates. As well, I can’t think of any nation on earth that has its built environment better documented photographically than Great Britain, thanks in no small measure to Country Life. In what amounted to a luck of timing, the magazine began in the late 19th century to include excellent photography in its articles about country seats. The sell offs and contents disbursals beginning in the 20th century, the result of new and functionally confiscatory estate taxes beginning just after the Great War occurred, in many instances, after a thorough photographic record had been made.

The notion of an ‘important’ piece of furniture, absent of provenance, should always beg question. If it is of unusually large scale, of course, it must have been meant for a stately home with a scale to accommodate it. As well, marquetry, inlay, gilding, elaborate carving, and applied decoration were ‘add-ons’ required by the quality for conspicuous front of house display: the hall, the library, and other so-called rooms of state. Even pieces somewhat less grand, either for more private spaces in a stately home or for the smaller houses of the gentry, typically conformed at least in general outline to pattern books that were part of every joiner’s workshop. Using for a moment Chippendale’s Director, the patterns were always adaptable to include, or exclude, decoration depending on the requirements of the customer, or the limits of the joiner’s skill.

It is tempting to think that, as talented as were the likes of the leading lights of English furniture- Chippendale, Vile, Cobb, Mayhew, Ince, the Linnells- that they would for display in their atelier- if they had one- have the occasional outré piece that would show all their skills, crawling with marquetry and dripping with ormolu. Occasionally, a dealer in furniture would offer pieces from a joiner already made up, but these were typically standard productions- case pieces including chests of drawers, bureaus, and night stands, and possible sample boards of ‘fancy’ work.  The notion of an exhibition piece is, moreover, largely a 19th century one- witness the Great Exhibition of 1851, the first showcase of British manufactures, and, so far as I know, the first such national exhibition ever mounted anywhere in the world.