As my last post was Hana’s batiks, which can lay some claim to being English, I thought I would pair them with this lovely piece of late Victorian/Edwardian furniture, known technically as a coiffeuse.
Without chasing this around the dictionary, according to my French this sounds like a person (or in this case, an object) for doing one’s hair. Essentially, it consists of a chest of drawers surmounted by some mini-drawers and three mirrors - the central one swivels in the vertical, the two side ones in the horizontal. I take it that this provides Madame with a big range of hair-attending-to possibilities, hence the name of the item. This one is in satinwood, which means that all the visible surfaces are fronted with a layer of this wood over the top of a more prosaic and cheaper one - in this case pine, which of course is also a great deal lighter.
Satinwood: (from http://answers.com )
- A deciduous tree (Chloroxylon swietenia) of India and Sri Lanka, having hard, yellowish, close-grained wood.
- A West Indian tree (Zanthoxylum flavum) having smooth, slightly oily, lustrous wood.
- The wood of either of these trees, used for furniture and cabinetwork.
Presumably, anyone even half in the know will tell you promptly which of these erstewhile English colonies provided the particular satinwood used in this piece.
I think it is a universal trait of people in the antiques & collectables business, if not of human beings themselves, to thirst after bargains, and be terribly proud of obtaining one, when it happens. I’m no exception. I bought this round the corner a couple of years ago for £120, which by anyone’s reckoning is a result - I would assume it would fetch 3-4 times that in one of the posher shops, even here on the south coast, let alone in London. The seller was a guy who makes the other dealers I have qualified elsewhere in these pages with the epithet taciturn sound like chatterboxes.
The gentleman in question, whose operation is in a side street off the main drag, has I think raised his prices a bit, as he has become rather more established in the intervening period, but this is nevertheless a curious feature of antique retailing which applies to Roger and Tom also, and is quite widespread: I refer to the way in which certain dealers seem to specialise in hoovering up merchandise at bargain-basement prices, whilst others buy from them to sell on at much higher ones. Of course this is how wholesaling works, but the people I refer to are not wholesalers, but retailers in their own right.
The long and the short of it is that, for people not in the know, it is worth being alerted to the fact that, when hunting for antiques, you should not take the first couple of prices that you come across as being rigidly indicative of the price you will have to pay everywhere for a given item. Bargain hunting really can be effective, even within a distance of a couple of streets.
The goldy-orange hanging behind is Moroccan, and will get its own slot at some point in the future, insallah.
