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.

Partridge Fine Art, one of the cornerstones of the English antiques trade, has moved into receivership this week, with the receivers actively looking for a buyer. Its tragic existence over the course of the last decade saw it nearly fail, then rescued in an LBO financed largely by Christie’s, with the result that a fair amount of the company’s inventory was auctioned off in May, 2006. It has been tough sledding all along, with marketing efforts including increased fairs participation and adding jewelry to its product mix apparently not sufficiently profitable to offset the high cost of operating on Bond Street.

Sadly, it would not surprise me to see the demise of Partridge all together, with its premises taken over by yet another fashion retailer. Asprey, a near neighbor to Partridge Fine Art, might have met the same fate had it not been acquired by the Sultan of Brunei. Perhaps Partridge’s might find someone else whose pockets, or oil wells, are as deep.