Are we in the midst of a bear market, generalized recession, or just a period of correction? I argue for the latter, as the drops we’ve seen in the worldwide financial markets are quickly followed by significant upticks. Trending downward? What constitutes a trend? As with so much else in life, any market cycle has to be experienced going forward, but can only be understood looking backward.

Amongst market analysts, though, I am sure the bears will always outnumber the bulls, except in the strongest and longest of bull markets. The why of this really has more to do with human nature than it does with any particular analytical expertise. This is what I would term the ‘happy to be wrong’ syndrome. A negative view expressed by anyone can always be tempered with the phrase, ‘I am happy to be wrong.’ Well, of course you would- ‘This plane is going to crash, but I am happy to be wrong.’ The fact is, the use of the phrase makes one right whatever happens. If, for instance, a company fails to perform, or an entire market tanks, the naysayer is looked upon as a sage. If nothing of the sort happens, as is often the case, everyone is overjoyed, and, in their joy, the marketplace Cassandra is forgotten. He’s happy, anyway, at least to have been wrong.

We’ve had an ongoing discussion about the housing market, battered if not necessarily in the market place, certainly in the press, and statistics about housing sales, housing stocks, and current market price declines are so varied it has been impossible for me to keep track of them. Moreover, in this sound bite world, nothing more than a statistic prefixed by a three or four word explanation is ever given. As statistics vary so wildly from time to time, I have to presume that different criterion have to be used in their calculation. As I am sure some of you do, as well, I closely follow a couple of particular real estate markets- not by reading about them in the newspaper, but by subscribing to a couple of research letters published by people I trust. Both are issued monthly, use base years and numbers as their constants in calculating statistical comparisons, and both cover a defined area with roughly 1 million residents and 750,000 housing units. And, both abstracts are, each month, in excess of 50 pages in length. As there are 300 million people in the United States, I would bet there are hundreds of similar reports published each month. Are these all read by any one analyst? As so-called subprime mortgage hedge funds were sold by the representations of third party rating services, I suspect that most analysts are deriving conclusions from the briefest of brief statistical abstracts. As the bull market in mortgage securities- so-called collateralized debt obligations- was driven by a limited understanding of the underlying investment, it seems highly unlikely that there has occurred any analytical spot-changing now. What we have, basically, is a preponderance of naysayers who are reporting selected statistics gleaned from others.

Perhaps a gloomy outlook is fashionable at the moment- it’s an election year, and economic gloom and dissatisfaction provides the most basic impetus for making a political change. Are we then in the midst of a manufactured market, with market turmoil engendered to ensure a political outcome that will return market stability? Cynical this sounds, and although this sort of thing has happened before, I am happy to be wrong.

I’m in the midst of reading Martin Wood’s terrific recent book about John Fowler, John Fowler: Prince of Decorators by Martin Wood- buy it, read it! If you are a Fowler fan and appreciate his country house style, I would recommend it. We’ve got plenty of books about Fowler, and by Fowler (and his research colleague and amanuensis John Cornforth), but the recent work is ever so slightly gossipy, giving one a few more glimpses into Fowler’s personal life, and his relationships with two redoubtable women, Sybil Colefax and Nancy Lancaster.

Of course, these ladies’ length of purse- well, longer than Fowler’s anyway- and social contacts certainly provided Fowler opportunities to broaden his range beyond the clever, though pretty basic, style associated with his first atelier in the King’s Road. Even with the assist of Colefax and Lancaster, the first 20 years or so of Fowler’s career proceeded through some astounding obstacles- the depression of the 1930‘s and war and privation that didn’t really end until England went off ration in 1954. What was available for use in interior design was in limited supply, and it was this necessity that was the mother of invention, witness old table cloths, for example, reused as loose covers on furniture, and elaborate window treatments composed of several types, colors and patterns of fabric- to mask the fact that there was insufficient supply of any one of them. ‘Shabby chic’ was, in large measure, born of this necessity.

Nancy Lancaster, with her flair and the experience of decorating her own homes, first of Kelmarsh Hall and then Ditchley Park, brought grandeur into Colefax and Fowler that allowed the firm, and Fowler, of course, to fairly quickly segue into the development of their signature country house style. What I always tend to forget, of course, is that for each family that had a country seat, they invariably had at least a pied a terre in town. Social and economic changes brought about by the war resulted in the decline in the number of grand townhouses, with the great and the good finding they now had to make do in oftentimes minuscule London accommodation. Fowler, of course, could call upon his early design experience in the King’s Road to make these small flats work for his clients.

I’ve often heard that Fowler himself was not a particularly happy man, possessed of perhaps a skin too few. His many contentious relationships included of all people, Nancy Lancaster, his closest colleague. Even so, Fowler’s style, even at its grandest, is fun without being fantastic, and inventive without being contrived. Well, maybe some of the window treatments are a bit too, too- but, then, if passmenterie is available, it simply has to be used, doesn’t it? If there is any criticism of Fowler, and there is always a revisionist view of any great man, it is that his interiors are insufficiently based on strict historic precedent. This, of course, ignores the fact that the canonical figures like William Kent, James Gibbs, and Robert Adam, into whose 18th century rubric Fowler sought to bring some modern restatement, were themselves great innovators. As Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony is an homage to Mozart and not just imitative, Fowler’s work represents an historically inspired aesthetic, tempered, naturally, by his own experience in his own day and age.

Reading this morning’s stock market report on MSN, the Dow decline, a confluence of higher jobless claims, some lower corporate earnings, and a decline in existing home sales, yielded what the reporters termed ‘the perfect storm.’

This expression is apt so far as it goes, but the implication is that, as with the hurricanes in the late summer of 2005, these are rare economic events, as in the 100 year storm that will happen only once in a normal lifetime. As someone who attempts to avoid clichés, it appears that ‘the perfect storm’ as ‘once in a lifetime’ has come to mean ‘not typically seen’, or more accurately ‘not too often’- either that, or  perfect storms are more common and lifetimes have become significantly shorter than they used to be.

Is it, though, ‘the perfect storm’? The so-called housing crisis was made very much worse by developers who got plenty of money and built houses not strategically, but wherever they could get cheap land. Naturally enough, the cheapest land is the furthest from any existing development and urban infrastructure- by this I mean, where there is no public transportation and people have to drive long distances to work or find basic services. Big surprise, home buyers find car commuting an expensive proposition and want to find something close in. My nephew and his wife, looking to purchase a home to house their expanding family, are shocked to find a dearth of housing in Los Angeles with the features they want- a neighborhood with good schools, and close to work for a short commute to his job. The flight to even the closest suburbs is a thing of the past. The empty nesters who are selling their large suburban homes with huge gardens and a pool, to be replaced with an in-town condo of reasonable proportions, are not finding younger couples with growing families to take their place. In our own highly urban neighborhood of Jackson Square, a huge number of formerly small, and not so small, office buildings are being changed over into condominiums- and selling quickly.

It is difficult for me to feel terribly sorry for builder-developers whose ignorance of fairly pronounced demographic trends led them to build in places where no one really wanted to live. Not sorry, but not surprised, either: home builders are something of a one-trick pony- if they can get the money to do so, they build houses. So, in fact, banks and investors who provided capital are all in the same intellectual boat as home builders. It is seldom that our president says anything particularly apt, but he did the other day- apropos of the freely flowing capital into the home building and mortgage markets over the last few years, ‘Wall Street got drunk.’

Some, of course, of the fairly recently built houses in remote suburbs, either sitting empty or now bank owned will be sold, and sold at a discount. One wonders to what extent these sorts of declines are skewing existing house price and sales statistics. Even bearing this in mind, my view is that the modest declines overall from a year ago suggest a correction in the market and not exactly the cataclysm of the perfect storm. Unfortunately, present activity is generally compared to events over the last however many years, without any statistical consideration that the last five, with explosive sales and price growth, represented an anomaly that was, in an apt use of the cliché, something seen once in a lifetime.

Although one cannot know what or how much of the ‘mixed’ economic news you pay attention to, my loyal readers may be interested to hear from me as their man on the ground in San Francisco: I have never, ever seen so many tourists. The famous venues here are replete with them- Fisherman’s Wharf, North Beach, Union Square, all the museums- heaving with them.

A large number are of a sort we haven’t seen- Russians and other eastern Europeans. Presumably their arrival has something to do with the relative weakness of the dollar, making thereby a holiday to San Francisco cheaper than, say, the Adriatic coast. Interestingly, these seem to be single destination package holidays that our European visitors are traveling on, as nearby destinations- Lake Tahoe and the Monterey peninsula, for instance- don’t seem to be as heavily traversed. Or if they are, it is with day-trippers only, as hotels there seem to have plenty of over-night accommodation available.

Locally, though, European tourists seem to be spending their money on, you’ve already guessed, Gap and Banana Republic clothing, and sale items- again, almost exclusively clothing- from Nordstrom’s and Macy’s. Yesterday, I fought my way through the crowds at Union Square to Saks to purchase a gift voucher for a friend’s birthday. I considered, frankly, giving him a voucher from Chappell & McCullar, but thought that was a bit mean. But I digress…

In spite of the huge numbers of tourist types making their way up and down Post Street, once I entered Saks, it was, well, sparse, shall we say, nearly empty save the well-turned out sales staff. The young man from whom I purchased the voucher said that traffic through the store was consistent with what they expect in the middle of the summer. It appeared to him, he said diplomatically, that the European tourists, of whom he was very aware, appeared to want to see different things in San Francisco. Different, apparently, than Saks- my words, not his. Although I haven’t made the effort to canvas either Nieman Marcus or Barney’s, I suspect their experience is the same.

Our European guests seem interested in English antiques, as our gallery traffic has been brisk, somewhat at odds, apparently, with Union Square. Brisk traffic, and interested in English antiques, but not, so far at least, with an interest that has translated into sales for export. I’ve read over the course of the past year or so about the ‘repatriation’ of European antiques from the United States, but we haven’t seen it. With the pound and particularly the euro strong against the dollar, purchases of this sort make some ostensible sense, but practically, for the retail antiques buyer, it makes none at all. Transport to Europe from either of the coasts is a fairly expensive proposition as the cost of air shipment has ramped up because of rising fuel prices and the reduction in numbers of flights. If you don’t know it, not all of what goes into the belly of a passenger aircraft is your luggage- a fair bit of it is freight. As well, once an antique piece arrives in Europe from the United States, it is subject to Value Added Tax- in England, where the assessment is the lowest of any country in the EU, the assessment is 5% of the declared value of the piece, or what Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise says the value is- whichever is more. We do have some sales of English antiques from our San Francisco galleries to European buyers, but not many.

The long and short of it is, we are replete with travelers- glad to see them, but not expecting much in the way of sales- nor, it appears, are any other luxury goods dealers.

With all that, gallery traffic still represents almost as important a numbers game for us as do actual sales. We log every single gallery visitor that comes through the door, and make an effort to interface with all of them- to the extent that our visitors feel comfortable doing so. ‘In your face’ sales techniques are off-putting in the extreme- we have taken our cue from the diplomatic techniques of Saks Fifth Avenue. Still, we know that the more people that look at our goods, the more chance we have to market them. Interest and good gallery traffic always presage good sales.

My last blog entry brought a spate of e-mails- admittedly a smallish spate, as I have only a handful of dedicated readers. The e-discussion centred on how I had brushed aside dining tables, focusing on sideboards as the primary dining room debacle. I readily agree with my readers who point out that dining tables can be more than a little problematic. As well, they are such a bane that a number of fine quality dealers rarely even offer them.

I say a bane for a number of reasons. First, while a sideboard was of some roughly typical dimensions determined by the purposes a sideboard served, a period dining table can be of widely varying dimensions, explained by considering their original context. As with so much multi-use 18th century furniture, an early dining table may not have been used exclusively for that purpose. The earliest dining table we’ve ever handled is presently in our inventory and is shown here fully extended. As such, it can handily seat 20 people. In its incarnation illustrated, it is composed of two demilune ends, two drop leaf center sections, and two leaves. With a little understanding of 18th century usage and room arrangement, one would surmise that the table was seldom fully assembled in its early life, and, when not in use, its components might have been deployed as follows- one of the drop leaf sections was in use for dining, accommodating 8 people around all four sides, with the other drop leaf section, with one leaf dropped, functioning as a side-serving table. The two demilune ends were probably used as pier or console tables, possibly on either side of a chimney breast, possibly in the dining room but just as possibly in some other room. The two leaves? Probably stored- and stored flat, apparently, as they haven’t warped in 250 years.

Regency period tables- those of the splayed legs that seem to inform the image most of us have of a ‘proper’ dining table- are then often times huge pieces of furniture, purpose-built for the now-standard purpose-built dining rooms that accommodated them. While of course length is an issue, the problem we typically encounter most often is depth. Our recent experience tells us that the optimal depth for even a grand modern house is something in the neighbourhood of 40” to 48”. Long and narrow is now what’s wanted to accommodate formal dining. However, formal dining in the Regency heyday of the dining table could not be accomplished with anything so shallow. Part of the dining experience was pageantry on a scale that none of us has ever experienced, unless you regularly attend state dinners at Windsor Castle. 10 courses or more would not be unusual, with a separate beverage for each course. Each place would have been laid with flatware, cutlery and drinking glasses to accommodate the whole of the meal- and a goodly number of the plates, too- all part of the panoply of dining. Consequently, the space required for this massive number of accoutrements was huge, extending an arm’s length from the outside edge toward the centre of the table. A 48” depth would be barely adequate- 60” is more like it.

Even with infrequent use, dining tables have traditionally had hard use. This, then, brings us to the second big issue surrounding period dining tables- their condition. Table tops were most at risk, with wine stains a particular problem. The alcohol in the wine has the unfortunate effect of dissolving the shellac of the table top, allowing the wine access to and absorption by the raw wood. A table cloth will have made matters worse, soaking up wine and keeping it in contact with the table top longer than if the wine were spilled and then mopped up from a bare table. The tannins and oxidation of the sugars in the wine will always leave a dark stain. Although modern restoration using chemical methods can generally ameliorate stains, the more typical method has been a mechanical one- strip off the old finish and then aggressively sand the entire table top to down below the level of the stains. Tragically, this effects to remove all the patination- but not always the stains!-  and a good bit of the figuring in the wood. Adding insult to significant injury is that this ‘restoration’ is frequently followed by the application of impermeable plastic finishes to ‘protect’ the top from future stains. Of all the items that are the victims of botched restoration, I think, as a class, dining tables rank fairly highly amongst the ranks of most frequently botched.

Did I mention, as well, that dining tables take up a lot of a dealer’s floor space? They do, of course, monopolizing space that could accommodate a number of other, smaller items.  So, a costly item, hard to find in good condition, with dimensions that are unlikely to match what’s required by the client, and hard to display. A bane. But, of course, the offset is the magnificence of the best tables: nothing that I can think of offers the expanse of fine quality matched timbers- and this is what makes them sought after, and makes a dealer swallow hard, take the acquisition plunge, and put them on display.