Featured Brown Furniture popular again?

Spoken by someone who has clearly never tried to remove paint from an antique piece of furniture. Occasionally you'll get lucky and it will mostly come off easily, but typically it becomes a battle of will, and damage to the piece will DEFINITELY occur. Heat, solvents, strippers, scrapers - none of them work as well as it seems they should. Unless you hire a paint conservator like Susan Buck (who I have hired, and believe me it is costly) you will be left with a mess on your hands. And it is only worth hiring out for the costliest of pieces - certainly not the ones mark and laura showed.

 

I generally want to scream at people who paint perfectly good antique furniture. That said, factory production 1930s and later pieces with damaged veneer? Missing parts? Might as well. Mass-produced mid-level items generally don't improve with age, and they look happier with a nice paint job, why not?

 

I have had to deal with stripping paint off wood that has sunk into the grain, it doesn’t sit on top. So you strip, then you have to sand down to get all the paint out. A job not for the faint of heart and a real problem if the piece has veneer!

 

For me, and I believe many other folks, it has to have interesting style elements, not the typical reproduction forms seen in the 20th c. A nice 1940 Cushman armchair that it would be a crime to paint. Though not 'brown', it's russet stained yellow birch.

 

I certainly agree. It is painting over genuine antique furniture with the expectation that "it can always be un-done" that makes me want to scream. What normally happens when someone tries to un-do the poorly applied paint is for the piece to be abandoned half-way through to be sent to a dumpster.

Yes, and it is the sanding of the original surface to attempt to remove the paint in the grain that is most destructive to the antique wood. Veneer or not, it destroys the original antique surface!

 

IMHO Only pine and plywood should be painted, and call me old fashioned but painting over mahogany and smoked oak is to me definitively sacrilegious!

I see here, near the bottom of the continent, a tiny hint of a little bit of a possible beginning of the upward trend in the comeback of the glorious brown furniture. Also, Christies and Sothebys have had (I always check their online catalogs) some in those arbiter-of-taste sales which always make it more visible. It's long overdue.

 

Tested this on a piece of wood. Shellacked it. Then painted on top of the shellac. Dried. Later was able to wipe the paint off with something (mineral spirits?), to get it back to the natural finish.

 

It was always popular with me! I love the stuff. Especially Edwardian.

 

Gorgeous piece. If it was in the U.K. I would seriously consider it.

 

Totally agree. There is no need to paint over rich lovely wood and call it upcycling. It’s lasted over a hundred years. Leave it be.

 

Hmm. I take your point and I agree if the item is damaged and this is the only way to make it serviceable but I have seen people paint over wood with inlay and marquetry in it and it’s a job to remove paint and revert that back to the original. I think we have to just accept that some people are philisteins.

 

Guilty as charged. But if the item really is in a bad way and painting can bring it back then I have no issue. I just have a problem with people f*ckcycling an item for no good reason.

 

Personally, I hate ruining a good antique piece of furniture by painting over original finish. I sure damn hope this painting fades over, or else the pristine dressers of yesterday will be impossible to find tommarrow!

 

I got PTSD seeing what people do to the depression glass I collect. Dear lord, sometimes I'd pay more than their asking IF THE PIECES WERNT GLUED TOGETHER!

 

I agree that some pieces - particularly damaged ones or fairly modern; dime a dozen furniture can have new life it painted. However, once painted... it is NEVER the same. Even with hand stripping, paint always remains in the deep crevices and joints, and to actually dip it in stripper truly damages the piece for ever...

I do "get" why people paint pieces and some really look awesome; but I cringe seeing some beautiful brown pieces being relegated to the paint brush!

Leslie

 

Obviously, this is never going to reach a consensus view on this forum however, it is equally obvious that many members here probably played some role in the unfortunate "great stripper craze" that occurred in the USA in the 1960s-1980s. This preference for "brown" wood destroyed much of the value for huge numbers of 18th-19th century painted pieces.
As a collector of early furniture, I almost ALWAYS have the opposite problem, what to do about a painted piece that got stripped somewhere along the way?

Exhibit # 1, an eastern shore va. corner cupboard recently purchased, Stripped!

Exhibit # 2, a paint restored (thru paint analysis) cupboard from the same region

 

CASE CLOSED! I WIN! PAINT RULES!

 

I have been closesly watching the price of Brown furniture at least on my side of the Atlantic for last few years. Between 2018 and 2020 ( into 2021) the price of brown furniture did experience a price increase and demand peaking in 2020.It jumped by about 40% -60% in price from its lows.However at around May 2021 prices began to fall again almost back to their 2018 lows.

There has been a slight uptick in the price of brown furniture, and select high quality furniture, origional Louis xv,xvi furniture is always going to command higher prices and at Christies we saw several Georgian chairs sell for tens thousands. $40,000 i think one georgian chair sold for. I know chairs can be found selling for a few pounds but the right chair is still a treasure. Georgian brown furniture and regency furniture always sell higher. Inevitably brown furniture will make comeback, painted furniture will only reduce the supply until we are at a point where brown furniture becomes a rarity.

However there seems tons of brown furniture still freely available on the market, supply still out weighs demand. During early 2021, I personally offloaded alot of items for a good price that i paid only a few pounds for in 2018. There was a sharp demand for quality furniture ( not specifically antique) but a solid oak sideboard that was unwanted and ignored,and I got for $15 at a local auction in 2018 had dozens of offers in 2021 when i listed it on the market.

The market dropped like lead ballon in June 2021. That is also true for some asian porcelain which is still on an upward trend, so i assume with the easing of covid restrictions. The vast majority of people, focused their attention and money away from second hand market including antiques. I got a few beautiful Qianlong blue and white platters and other items for a almost nothing during this time whioch a few months earlier would have sold for 8 times more,simply because the market had a sudden sharp drop ion demand and supply saturated for a short time. I heard many comments during the sumer of 2021 that there was a large supply of blue and white Asian porclain on the market and i am guessing it was due to a drop in demand.

 

I agree that an originally painted piece in good condition should not be stripped.

I also agree that an originally stained piece in good condition should not be painted.

I fall into the category of respecting the original design of the piece and intention of the furniture maker regardless of what comes and goes in and out of fashion.