The shift away from brown furniture seems to have been accelerated by the financial crisis, though the necessary ingredients for its decline were already there. “Glass towers kept going up,” says Rachel Karr, whose family owns Hyde Park Antiques in New York. “Antiques in general were undesirable, because they blocked the view people were purchasing.”
“We were still doing business, but selling to a smaller and smaller and older and older group,” says Kevin Kleinbardt, a co-owner of New York’s Yew Tree House antiques. “It was a shrinking market, and so many dealers had retired, and younger dealers hadn’t come up to replace them.”
And that was where Sergeant saw a spectacular opportunity. A decade might be a rounding error when you’re trying to date a 300-year-old bookshelf, but when you’re trying to sell that bookshelf, 10 years can seem like an eternity.
“You can look at art and antiques as different grades,” he explains. “AAA grade will sell for AAA prices, but the AA and A and high-B categories have a lot of potential.” With the market idled, their prices are way down, he continues, “but the reality is: There’s an ongoing demand for great things, and there are a lot of holes in the market.”
A Slow Comeback
During the pandemic, though, those holes appear to have narrowed. The market is showing signs of surprising buoyancy, dealers say—not across the board, and certainly not at price points the field once experienced, but “every once in a while I spot something that’s really good in a sale,” Howell says, “and it [sells for] 10 times, or 20 times, what I thought it would make. There are people that have it on their radar.”
Kleinbardt agrees: “After a long period of dormancy, it’s really picked up. The last 9, 10 months have been sort of crazy.”
Berglund says this renewed interest means they have to move quickly. “We think this is the beginning of the tide coming in, and we think there’s a lot of water behind that” initial activity.
Maybe, he says, “there’s 10 years of strong demand, and maybe we missed one year. Well, there’s nine left, and that’s still an opportunity for me.”
A Recovery in Stages
They envision the market progressing, Berglund continues, from the top down. “As people continue to move back to more traditional [furniture], that trend will continue to expand,” he says. “It won’t just be the top 1% of material, it will be the top 5%, and then the top 10%, as more people come into the market.”
Everyone, he says, “can’t have the No. 1 Philadelphia highboy because someone’s already bought it, so you’re going to the next best, and then the next, and that’s where the recovery is happening.”
At least anecdotally though, the market recovery won’t be even.
“People are staying away from tall things, because they want to save the space for a painting,” Kleinbardt says. “So we’re noticing long, narrow tables—something like the bottom half of a Welsh dresser or a hunt board is popular, because you can still put a great piece of modern art above it.”
Berglund, for his part, says that they’re in the business of making the right purchases at the right time. “It’s like stocks and bonds,” he says. “It’s identifying what the opportunity is and separating the wheat from the chaff.”
This article was provided by Bloomberg News.