notes

That piece of sagacity from the mouth of one of our friends of long standing, a prominent Federal jurist and, I am happy to say, a collector of English antiques. He said it while waxing eloquent in front of a number of his colleagues and clerks while in our stand at an antiques show, the strong implication that we were the jeweler worth knowing. Hang on- let me back away from the self service by deleting the definite article. We are ‘a’ jeweler worth knowing.

Of course, despite the thinned ranks in the antiques world, there remain a number of good dealers, but buying from a good dealer does not necessarily mean that one has made a good buy. I say this apropos of an investment newsletter soon to be released by Deloitte LLP, citing the present as a good time to buy antiques. Further, in comparison to the purchase of new furniture, we are told, antiques represent better value for money as they are better made of better materials than new furniture and, relative to the likes of IKEA, retain their value.

Well, yes…but all this is certainly old news, old that is, to anybody that’s given the matter any thought- or sold a formerly new, formerly expensive but now relegated to the garage item at a yard sale. Have dealers yet been swamped with any number of buyers looking to park their entire furniture budget in quality antiques? Not in our experience. While everyone, and particularly private collectors want to make certain that they are getting value for money, this usually takes the form of driving Keith and me down on our prices. Does this assure our buyers, then, they have made a good buy? ‘Further assures’, I’d say, as we with most dealers who remain in business price their material to sell, with our stock in trade perforce representing value for money. This sounds like I’m begging for some financial understanding (read ‘mercy’), albeit in a roundabout fashion. I suppose I am.

With all that, for the occasional buyer of antiques, the pricing differences between ostensibly similar material may be a cause for significant confusion, and it is this confusion that results, unfortunately for us, in buyer’s wanting to grind us down on price . Condition, color, timber quality, and many, many more factors you’ve read about before on this blog contribute positively, or negatively, to the value of any given piece of furniture. People will often look to auction results as the current benchmark price for just about anything in the fine and decorative arts. While auction sales can be a tool, it is nearly impossible to completely divine what made a piece sell for a particular amount on a given day. The Antique Collector’s Club  annually publishes an index on antiques with the aim of establishing current market pricing, through canvassing innumerable auction and dealer records. While the index should be thought reasonable information with The Antique Collector’s Club an honest broker, it should be considered more a baseline than a benchmark, because it is an impossibility to account for the very often and very subtle differences between a good piece and a great piece.

This, of course, is where the jewel-jeweler trope is most appropriate and very much worth bearing in mind. The difference between the best and indifferent quality bears as close an inspection as viewing two stones under a jeweler’s glass.

This last Saturday, we completed our 4th annual summer sale. For those of you who feel you’ve missed out, never fear- we have one or two items left.  (pause for ironic grin)

With all that, I have to say despite the times, our summer sale worked about as well as it always has, stimulating interest in not only sale items, but other pieces, too. In fact, the biggest beneficiary this year was our own line of furniture, Contemporary Classics. We are awash with orders for these pieces, with our workshop booked up for the next several months.

Gratifying, of course, but significant, too, in that our register of interest seems to indicate people seem to be better pleased with the economic outlook. Mind you, we did not have any huge sales as we did during our summer sale last year, but we did have a number of good ones, with the actual number of invoices written in excess of last year. Also of significance, we did have a lot of interior design interest, actually greater than last year. However, our lack of big ticket sales was rather a follow-on from the level of designer. Specifically, designer purchases were of accent items, artwork and small pieces of furniture to integrate into existing projects. The large items- bookcases, sideboards, dining tables and sets of chairs used to anchor a room and normally indicative of a new project- these were not strong movers.

But the new projects, I’d venture, are on the way. One of our better clients, an excellent home builder, told us that as of this last Friday he had sold 30 new homes for the week. And, yesterday at brunch with Greg Normart, our local San Francisco real estate maven from Herth Realty, Greg reported a new 7-figure listing that, in its first week, had 14 offers, all of them in excess of the asking price. Greg tells us that his challenge is to find sufficient listings for the buyers he has. Anecdotal, both of these sources, but they do represent trustworthy information from people on the ground.

San Francisco’s a tourist mecca, with this summer’s season yielding a plethora of visitors from the far corners. We’ve so far done our bit for the local economy, with visitors from Europe creasing our guest towels for the last several weeks.

More welcome, and less taxing, visitors this last weekend were my sister and brother-in-law, doubtless come up to see we are not treating their son and our gallery colleague Jack Tremper with an inordinate degree of abuse. On several previous visits, my brother-in-law had asked that we go for dinner to The House of Prime Rib, the long-established dinner house on Van Ness, fondly remembered from his childhood as the place to go whenever his family was transiting through. It had been over thirty years since I’d been there myself, and our recollections coincided with the spot as sort of the archetypical 1960’s vintage fine restaurant. They seem to be doing something right, at least ostensibly, as 1) they are still in business and 2) we had been unable to book a table on any recent Saturday save after 9PM.

This last Saturday, Jack booked a table for all of us at 7PM, and we arrived promptly. It was busy, and we waited a half hour or so to be seated. I always find this kind of wait suspect, as it follows another old restaurant tradition- keep’em in the bar to pump a few drinks in them. We didn’t do that, but waited I thought patiently for a table. When we finally got seated, it was, it seemed, in the most crowded place in a generally crowded dining room, with the table wedged between banquets and other smaller tables. Not surprising, we wanted something better. The none-too-friendly hostess told us bluntly that this was all she had and it was either take it or wait and take our chances she might come up with something better. When Keith remonstrated that we had booked in several weeks earlier for the evening, the hostess looked, at most, nonplussed, but gave us no further rejoinder. With no other alternative, we all sat down at the table.

I wish I could say that the meal was redeemed by the food and/or service but it wasn’t. Clearly, the menu items and their method of service were vestiges of former practice, but, for instance, the ‘chilled’ salad fork is not chilled, or at least ours weren’t, and the salad bowl spun in a bowl of ice ostensibly to keep the salad crisp could not be performed at tableside as in the olden days- this old bit of theatricality subordinated to the desire to cram more tables into the place.

At more than $40 per person, plus a $50 bottle of wine, the meal was certainly not cheap. Was it good? Trying to cast my mind back to what we ate at restaurants during my, pardon the pun, salad days, made me think that the food we had was also sort of vestigial- similar, but in a gloppy, mass-produced kind of way. Evocative, but basically in only sufficient measure to mask the fact that it was crappy and expensive.

As the poet says, you can never go home again, and our dinner last Saturday was a dashing of our nostalgia, certainly. The House of Prime Rib I would characterize as now a tourist trap of the first water.

…and both Christies and Sotheby’s reflect huge decreases in revenue, Sotheby’s by half over the same period last year, while Christies would have declined almost identically if one were to exclude the successful Yves St-Laurent sale. Privately held Christies doesn’t release profit figures, but it can’t have been any further in the black, or to put it more appropriately, any less in the red, than its major competitor. Enormous staffing reductions, and an increased workload undertaken by those staff remaining, have allowed both salesrooms to hemorrhage a little less money. As I write this, Sotheby’s is trading at $16, about half its value of a  year ago, but up significantly from its 52 week low of $6.47 realized in early March of this year.

Although it is the performance at auction of English antiques that is my primary focus, for the salesrooms it is Impressionist and 20th century art that has been its mainstay. In spite of reduced revenue, the last year has elicited some bright spots- the aforementioned St Laurent sale being arguably the brightest- but, frankly, not much good material has flowed through the salesrooms. No surprise, of course, given that neither Christies or Sotheby’s have been offering any sorts of inducements, by way of either advances or guarantees, to winkle out prize consignments. And, of course, those who do not have to sell their better pieces are disinclined to do so in a world-wide recession wherein achieving top dollar is chancy at best.

With all that, the demand for the material that Christies and Sotheby’s markets has not evaporated completely. Mind you, this is not to ignore the bloodbath amongst art and antiques dealers that began a couple of years ago does not yet show signs of abating. The wisdom of what Sotheby’s and Christies sought to do, becoming a retail marketplace for the material that was formerly and almost exclusively the province of the antiques and fine arts dealer, is now an open question. That their efforts have contributed to the trade now being only a shadow of its former self, can the revenues and profits of the big salesrooms recover to anything like the levels they enjoyed prior to 2008.

We’ve had the great pleasure the last few days of hosting our godson, ours being his first stop during school holidays. As is so often the case, one only visits sites of local interest when escorting visitors, and I’ve absented myself from the shop to do just that. What I’ve noticed, and something that’s changed from this time last year, are the numbers of international tourists. That the exchange rate is sort of in their favor might have something to do with it, but the fact of their presence in such great numbers makes me believe that an economic recovery is well underway. True, airlines and tour packagers are offering some good travel deals, but no matter how inexpensive, unless one is possessed of a positive outlook long-range travel is not what one does.

From the general to the (English antiques dealer) specific- our gallery activity has been brisk. Sales activity? Not so much, but it has to start somewhere and the gallery visit precedes anything more remunerative.

I’ve termed this entry ‘dog days’ mainly because of the time of year, but, frankly, with the coolish temperatures over the last few days in San Francisco, it hardly feels like it. I suppose, with all the tourists in San Francisco and the concomitant increase in gallery traffic, we remain doggedly optimistic.