New bargains on old furniture

A year ago, Antique Furniture Depot, an auction house in Ronkonkoma, N.Y., would get about $3,000 for a circa 1830 mahogany corner cabinet. Recently, one that came up at auction fetched $710, says general manager Laura Bishop.

A Louis XV secretaire desk and chest of drawers recently went for $800, a third of what it could have sold for in the recent past.

And 19th century grandfather clocks now sell for as little as $1,500, down from about $3,500 a year ago.

Americans’ taste in furniture has shifted, and that’s producing big bargains in one category: antiques.

Some antique furniture is going for a quarter of what it fetched a year ago as people gravitate toward contemporary styles. On top of that, struggling consumers have been liquidating their collections of vintage pieces, flooding the market. Even high-end auctioneers such as Sotheby’s have seen some disappointing sales of all but the rarest pieces.

Flip through any home magazine and it’s tough to spot an antique among all the chrome, clean lines and modernist decor. The trend is reinforced by the products promoted by retailers such as Target and Ikea and the set designers for TV shows. About the only area of vintage furniture that remains widely popular is midcentury modern pieces by designers such as Charles and Ray Eames, or pieces inspired by such designers.

The shift is reflected in sales on eBay: from April through June, 2,376 midcentury modern items and 2,132 Eames-inspired items sold on the auction site, compared with 141 Queen Anne pieces, 71 Federal pieces and 1,782 Victorian items, the site says.

“The bottom has fallen out,” says Seth Fallon, owner Copake Auction in Copake, N.Y. He says round Victorian oak tables that used to fetch $700 or so are going for around $300, and a 19th century mahogany Chippendale-style slant-lid desk that would have sold for $25,000 a year ago recently fetched $14,000.

In Westmont, Ill., Antiques on Old Plank Road gets several calls a day from people looking to sell their collections; it used to receive only several such calls a week, says owner Richard Buxbaum. Alhambra Antiques in Coral Gables, Fla., is posting almost all its growing inventory on the Web, and cutting prices 30 percent from what it would have charged in the store. Still, people ask if that’s the best price, says marketing director Doug Scott. “Ever since this spring people have slowed their buying,” he says.

Auction houses say even prices at the higher end – furniture going for up to $100,000 – are softening. The only market still thriving in English furniture, for example, is that for exceptional pieces. “Everything else – tables, chairs, useful pieces – that are very well made but don’t have the merit of great quality are just drifting along,” says Simon Redburn, Sotheby’s specialist in English furniture.

At a Sotheby’s auction in April, an Irish mahogany card table circa 1750 that was estimated to fetch $40,000 to $60,000 went for $37,000, and a George III mahogany game table circa 1765, estimated to fetch $10,000 to $15,000, went for $8,750. Both prices include the buyer’s premium. At a Sotheby’s sale of 18th century French furniture in June, the sell-through rate by lot, or the percentage of items that sold, was a sluggish 69 percent. Among pieces that didn’t sell were a matched set of Louis XVI furniture estimated to fetch $8,000 to $12,000, and a Louis XV caned sofa estimated to go for $5,000 to $8,000.

In general, prices for midrange antiques tend to fall during economic downturns, as they did in the 1930s and the late 1980s, says Leigh Keno, co-author of “Hidden Treasures: Searching for Masterpieces of American Furniture” and one of the assessors on PBS’s “Antiques Roadshow.” In addition, the market has softened now because fewer people collect specific periods of antiques as they did in the 1950s through the 1980s. Instead, homeowners and decorators usually mix different furniture styles. Armistead & Epperson, an investment bank in Richmond, Va., that tracks the furniture industry, expects an 8 percent to 10 percent price rise for imported furniture and a 5 percent to 6 percent percent rise for domestic furniture over the next year.

All this adds up to bargains for people who like antiques. Layla Masri, a 36-year-old Web site designer in Alexandria, Va., used to think of antiques as “one of those expensive things you had to be older and retired to afford.”

When she realized she could get “timeless, beautiful, carved, complicated” Victorian pieces for the same price, Masri and her husband started checking out online auctions and antiques shops. They recently bought an elaborately carved sofa and end chairs for $2,000 and an English walnut vitrine circa 1875 for $3,000. “You can see that someone cared about it when it was first made,” she says. “It’s not like it was pumped out of a factory in China.” On a trip back from New York to see a heavy metal band in concert, her husband stopped at an antiques shop in Philadelphia to pick up a crystal chandelier. “That’s when I knew we’d really embraced this,” she says.