Sorting the Wheat from the Chaff

Welcome back to our ongoing series, "How to tell 'Real' Vintage Furniture from Contemporary Knockoffs". So, using the steps outlined in our previous posts in this series (here, here, and here) you've determined that the piece of furniture that you want to buy is in fact vintage. However, just because it's vintage doesn't mean that it's necessarily worth buying - there are many other things to consider before you make the decision to plunk down your hard earned dollars! Today we're going to get started on the discussion of differentiating between "good" vintage and "bad" vintage. This is a fairly deep topic that's worth spending some time on, because it really cuts to the heart of what we vintage decorative arts dealers actually DO for a living.

The funny thing is, whether or not a given object or piece of furniture is "good" or not is largely subjective. However, we are not completely lost at sea with this - there are certain attributes that a piece may or may not have which we can use to determine whether or not it is "good".

Chief among these are

• designer provenance (i.e. whether it was designed by a "major" or known designer)
• manufacturer provenance (what company made the piece)
• overall quality of construction and aesthetic sensibility

When one is unable to determine who the designer or maker of a piece was, we can always fall back on the quality of construction and aesthetic sensibility to make our decision on whether the piece is worth buying.

Names and Faces
As you start shopping for vintage furniture, you will start to notice that there are lots of brand names and designers that get thrown about willy-nilly by people in the know. If you're serious about collecting vintage furniture, one of the first things you're going to want to do is familiarize yourself with some of these names. Brand names, or manufacturers, are generally easier to familiarize one's self with than designers, simply because many pieces of furniture made by a given furniture maker are marked as such.

There are certain manufacturers that are synonymous with high end design, which we will discuss in greater depth in our next post. However, before we get to the discussion of the actual company that manufactured the piece, we're going to want to consider where the piece was actually made. The two main countries that you're likely to see pieces come out of are the USA and Denmark, so those are the two we will focus on here.

As an aside, it should be noted that a certain amount of "Danish Modern" furniture was produced in the other Scandinavian countries (Sweden, Norway and Finland), but the large majority of it was actually made in the tiny country of Denmark (if there was ever a competition for the number of pieces of furniture produced per capita, Denmark would surely take first prize). Although a significant amount of furniture of this era was produced in Sweden, for the most part it is relatively interchangeable with furniture that was actually produced in Denmark.

Here are some key differences between Scandinavian and American mid century furniture

• 9 times out of 10, if it's made out of teak, it's Scandinavian.
• 9 times out of 10, if it's made out of walnut, it's American.

At least initially, it can be difficult to tell the difference between teak and walnut. Broadly, walnut will be more brown while teak will be more red. Also, walnut grain tends to be broader and more distinct, while teak is usually tighter with shorter grain marks. Of course there are exceptions, for the most part these rules hold true. We've included images of "typical" teak and walnut grain patterns below:

• In mid century furniture, lighter woods such as maple and birch are more commonly associated with American makers. For instance, all Heywood Wakefield furniture produced in the 1940s and 1950s was made from solid American yellow birch, and all Paul McCobb Planner Group furniture was made from solid maple (although it was often stained darker).
• Be aware that while the above mentioned woods will cover perhaps 70% of mid century furniture, the remaining 30% is comprised of a sometimes-confusing hodgepodge of different woods such as Rosewood, Mahogany, Oak, Elm, Ash, Cherry, and others. It should also be noted that frequently, lighter woods that have been stained dark will be identified as Walnut by people who don't know any better. However, once you get familiar with what real walnut looks like, it's easy to tell the difference. We will explain these differences in greater depth in a future blog post.

• When looking at dressers, American made dressers tend to have deeper drawers than Danish dressers. So much so, that while vintage Danish dressers can be very pretty to look at, they are often not very practical to use because the drawers are so shallow. We have come to the conclusion that in Denmark, they do not store sweaters in dresser drawers.

• As a general rule, Danish furniture usually has more "sculptural" qualities than American. For example, consider the two credenzas pictured above. Both are long and low, and basically the same shape. However, notice how the details on the Danish piece are much finer - how the corners are rounded and come together at 45 degree angles, how the legs are nicely shaped and curved so as to flow out of the case rather than just sticking out of it. The handles for the doors are also carved pieces of wood that echo the sculptural qualities present in the rest of the piece. The American piece is much more boxy and workmanlike - compare the corners on the cases of both pieces and you will see the difference.

Stay tuned for our next installment, when we will go into greater detail talking about some of the major American furniture makers that you should know about!

How to tell "Real" Vintage Furniture from Contemporary Knockoffs - Part 1: Talking to the Seller

Today in Janus Home's installment series "A Primer on Modern Furniture", we will start a “series within a series”, if you will, on a topic of great value to anyone considering buying modern furniture on the secondary market - "How can I tell 'genuine' mid century modern furniture from contemporary knockoffs"? Although this might seem like a daunting task, there are a few easy tips that we can give you that will make distinguishing the wheat from the chaff much, much easier. We are going to break this down into four separate posts: talking to the seller; powers of observation; commonly reproduced vintage designs; and last but not least, how to distinguish “quality” vintage furniture from lower-end or “middle of the road” vintage.

Part 1: Talking to the seller

Over the last five years or so, a little site called craigslist.org has positively revolutionized the way people buy and sell their stuff (in addition to making the newspaper classified section virtually obsolete!). You can find pretty much anything and everything you’re looking for on Craigslist – if you’re patient enough! It has also made it much easier for a buyer to connect directly with a seller without the intercession of a middleman or dealer. Let's say you're going to look at a pair of chairs that you found on Craigslist, and you want to be sure that they are actually vintage and not purchased last year at Target. The most obvious thing to do is simply to ask the seller where and when they got them! If you're at the seller's house looking at the chairs, and you ask them when and where they got them, and they say "Oh, I got them from my Grandmother and she had them for as long as I can remember", that's obviously a good sign. If they say "we got them at Macy's a few years ago", that's obviously not such a good sign. Admittedly, this is a pretty boneheaded example - however, sometimes the obvious solution to the problem is actually the right solution! It's pretty rare that a private seller of a piece of furniture will deliberately try to pass something off as something it's not, so you can usually get valuable information from them .

Things get a little trickier when you're buying from a resale shop, antique/vintage shop or antique mall. Of these three, the small antique/vintage store owner is most likely to provide you with accurate information about a piece. With an antique mall or a resale shop, it's usually almost impossible to talk to anyone who has any direct connection to the piece. Forget talking to the actual person who owned the piece, at that point you can't even talk to the person who bought it from the original owner! Although it’s something of a long shot, it can’t hurt to ask the antique mall staff if they could contact the dealer whose piece of furniture you’re considering. In any case, it's important to know the reputation of the shop that you're buying from! Talk to your friends and see if they've had any experiences, good or bad, with that particular shop. Social media sites like Twitter can also be a great way to get feedback from people on specific shops. These days, if someone has a genuinely lousy experience somewhere, it can get broadcasted to the web for all to see in a matter of minutes.

So, assuming you’ve exhausted all the possibilities listed above and are still unable to squeeze any pertinent information out of anyone with relation to the piece of furniture you’re interested in…you’ll have to fall back on your powers of observation! Stay tuned for our next installment, which will provide you with some great pointers on how to do just that.