The Economy: A Glimpse of Demand Gone By...

Not the Right Desk to Carve a Name In...

By Paula Dietz
Published: August 17, 1989

BOB OWEN'S work as a master carver has come into great demand since June 3, when a circa-1760 Newport desk and bookcase attributed to John Goddard was sold for $12.1 million, the most paid at auction for anything but a painting.

Mr. Owen is one of 21 master carvers reproducing another Newport desk at the Kindel Furniture Company in Grand Rapids, Mich. Since the June 3 sale, at Christie's in New York, Kindel has received 87 orders for the desks at $19,016, creating a waiting list until next June.

According to specialists, only 10 of the tall bonnet-topped secretaries were made in the 18th century by the Goddards and Townsends, Quaker families of Colonial cabinetmakers in Newport and Kingston, R.I. The piece auctioned in June, the last of the originals in private hands, was sold to raise money to repair the 1791 Nightingale-Brown House in Providence, R.I., the largest 18th-century wood-frame house in the country. Trade sources said the purchaser was the Texas financier Robert M. Bass.

 

The Kindel piece, now on sale at 73 stores and showrooms nationally, is based on an original made in the 1770's for a family named Updyke. That desk is at the Winterthur Museum and Gardens in Delaware. Kindel, which was licensed to make the desk as part of Winterthur Reproductions, has averaged 37 orders a year since 1982. Kindel said half its profit on the pieces went to Winterthur. The Kindel replica will not be the only one. Allan T. Breed, a cabinetmaker in Maine, has been commissioned by Christie's to replace the auctioned desk, which stood between two windows in the parlor of the Nightingale-Brown house for 175 years. Reproducing the desk was a condition of the sale, Christie's said, because it was still being used to the end (a Parcheesi set, telephone books and old pencils were removed from it). Mr. Breed said the reproduction would cost Christie's about $50,000.

The demand for such reproductions raises the question of why people purchase expensive copies rather than original contemporary designs or less expensive antiques that would increase in value. Only recently, Colonial Revival furniture, made around the centennial in 1876, has begun to appreciate in value at auction. A New York dealer and appraiser, Margaret B. Caldwell, said of the Kindel desk and other such reproductions, ''The return on the financial investment would be greater in a savings account.''

Alan Fromkin, who owns Classic Galleries in Huntington, L.I., explained his interest in the reproduction Rhode Island desk this way: ''Between scale, craftsmanship and finish, no other piece is made like it.'' He bought one for his house in Lloyd Neck, L.I., where it stands in the entry foyer, holding household bills and family photographs. The bookcase, which is left open, displays decorative brass, antique books and plants.

A New Jersey couple, the husband a psychiatrist and the wife a pediatrician, purchased a Winterthur replica desk last year for their English-style manor house on 110 acres of land. They furnished their house entirely with reproduction furniture, believing that antiques were not in good enough condition to use in a family home. They also have the desk in their entrance foyer, where it is used for personal correspondence and to display a collection of paperweights.

To be a bona fide reproduction, the Kindel desk had to be an exact copy of the original and had to use the same materials: mahogany with poplar and sycamore. It has 17 drawers and 6 small compartments, as well as an upper bookcase with 10 sections divided into 19 subdivisions. Kindel's carvers take 37 hours to carve the voluptuous concave and convex shells that adorn the shutterlike doors of the bookcase; the slant lid of the desk; the corkscrew finials, and other adornments.
Fifty desks can be made by Kindel in a year. The Goddard and Townsend workshops took three or four months to make just one.

Mr. Breed - working alone at Cider Hill Woodworks, his old barn-board studio in York, Me. - will need at least four months to make the new desk for the Nightingale-Brown House. The 35-year-old cabinetmaker takes the view that with some antiques now commanding such high prices, people will no longer scoff at well-made reproductions.

A collector and restorer of antiques since his teens, Mr. Breed worked with the late Vincent Cerbone, a restorer at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. In the 1970's, he began making reproductions of American antiques to order; many are in old New England houses whose original furnishings are owned by private collectors.

To reproduce the Nightingale-Brown desk, Mr. Breed, working at Christie's in New York, drew and photographed details for two days, making templates of drawers and rubbings and silhouettes of the six boldly carved shells. ''Story sticks'' an eighth of an inch thick were used to mark features like the projecting and recessed panels, which are called block-fronting.
''We went over the desk with Mr. Breed nail by nail for hours,'' said John A. Hays, a specialist in American decorative arts at Christie's.

Back in his studio, Mr. Breed boiled the information down into a full-scale blueprint, which soars about nine and a half feet. If certain profiles, like the corkscrew finials, have been altered over the years by repairs, Mr. Breed will produce the replicas in their original forms. He is looking for enough straight-grain mahogany so it will all match.

''All the skills I have ever learned, including turning, carving and making dovetails, will be brought to bear in this design,'' Mr. Breed said. ''I have made individual pieces with more difficult and complicated details, but this desk is like a sampler of all cabinetmaking skills.''
Mr. Breed will not have the benefit of John Goddard's experience in chiseling shells with the smooth, sure form that is the height of cabinetmaking. He expects to do a few trial shells to get the rhythm, and he hopes to achieve the same perfection, because the secretary has become so visible and well known.  ''I feel like a conductor conducting his first Beethoven Fifth,'' he said. ''If I mess up, everyone's going to know.''

Getting Rid of that stench in your Vintage Furniture

We attend a lot of estate sales and sometimes the most attractive piece of furniture can have a reprehensible “Air” about it.  You all know what we mean.  I’m sure there’s a term for it in the English language but I just do not know of a word that specifically describes what I mean.  It’s an odor that would fall under the same heading as moth balls, musty, or stale.  It’s an odor more closely associated with “Grandmother” but in their defense no grandmother I’ve met ever smelled that way.  Whatever word exists for it, the malodorous element is the antithesis of “New”.

Among the signs that you’ve gone off the deep end concerning anything you pursue in life is an inordinate strangely chaotic attention to details.  What I mean is that the tiniest infraction seemingly violates your delicate sense of what you deem right or wrong: hence the “Smell”. 

We’ve struggled many years with this. Whether it’s Lemon oil or sprays or home remedies nothing seemed to work for long.  One particular thing we’ve formulated is a fragrant spray which does a pretty damn good job of getting rid of that odor in old furniture drawers.  This proprietary solution has the fragrant overtone of Imported French Vanilla with a very subtle woody undertone of Hazelnut.  It has an extremely rich French Vanilla aroma especially compared with all the diluted fake smelling products on the market.

 It is yellow-ish red in color and when added to a spray bottle is thick enough to make spraying a little difficult.  We recommend spraying and wiping on the interior of the drawers.  Then going back and wiping it down again a few times with a dry cloth as it can be a little greasy sometimes depending on what your drawers are sealed with.  Once you’ve properly applied the conditioner, the fragrance will be reminiscent of something between a French commissary and a fresh cup of vanilla café latte.  Bad as it sounds sometimes it makes you hungry but the longer you use it, well, you can imagine the effect it would have on you.  Be sure to wear gloves for no other reason than your dog might confuse you with a sugar cookie.  We’ve used it for some time now with no troubles and it is head & shoulders by far the best thing we’ve found to condition our projects and eliminate the ever present “Air” we all know so well. 

If you’re interested in acquiring this, or any other of our favorite odor nutrilizing products, please let us know by simply clicking “Contact Us”.  Our editors e-mail is the best way to get more details.