What can you tell me about this china cabinet and buffet set?

August 17, 2016 12:16 PM

I just purchased a china cabinet and its matching buffet at a tag sale. The owner said they were from the 1920s but she actually bought them in the late 90s. To me this doesn't have the patina of one hundred years, but I'm no expert. What do you think?

Pictures:

Cabinet in full
Top half of cabinet
Top detail of cabinet
Dovetailing on cabinet drawer


Buffet in full
Buffet angle
Handle on buffet drawer
Damage on buffet top surface

I paid $300 for the two. Fair?

posted by Dragonness to Home & Garden (11 answers total)

Best answer: Yes, those look like they're from the 20s or maybe 30's/40's. Definitely prewar.

You paid a fair price. In fact depending on the condition, you may have gotten a deal.

If you're curious, I can tell that they're definitely old for two reasons:

1. Modern pieces like this (made from the 80s to today) are usually much larger and of clunkier design. This is partially because homes tend to have more square footage, with larger rooms that can accommodate bulky furniture, and partially because of the Pottery Barn, Shabby Chic, "rustic" trend in furniture in the 90s.

2. Older replica pieces (like the 70s "colonial" trend) tend to be blockier, machine-built on clear rectangular lines. There is rarely the sloping design you see on middle segment of the buffet, or legs that extend up into the main design of the piece. It's just, like, a rectangular chunk of cabinetry set on some legs. You also often see particleboard, veneers, and cheap hardware.

Higher quality furniture from after around the 40s also tended to be modern in design, which is why the lack of clunkiness or fiberboard is a good tell. If this is a fake, it is a very good fake and likely dates from a period where expensive replicas of 20s style furniture wouldn't have been sought after, anyway.
posted by Sara C. at 12:25 PM on August 17, 2016 [5 favorites]

Best answer: Before the war, one side of my family used to be in the furniture-making business - they worked for a high-end Chicago company and were allowed to use the premises to make furniture for themselves after hours, paying only for materials. So we have some very nice furniture kicking around. That cabinet is very similar to a highboy we have. While you're right that the finish doesn't look 20s to me, it was probably stripped and refinished somewhere along the way.

I'd pay $300 for the both of them without a second thought, if I had the money and owned less furniture.
posted by Frowner at 12:28 PM on August 17, 2016

Best answer: More than fair. Probably refinished, but still lovely.
posted by mmf at 12:37 PM on August 17, 2016 [2 favorites]

Best answer: Awesome insight above. I'm a furniture amateur, but this definitely reads 1920s or 1930s to me and $300 seems like a very reasonable price. If that's your house, they also look fantastic in your house! Nice score.
posted by areaperson at 12:47 PM on August 17, 2016

Best answer: They look very similar in style to a desk that my grandparents had from the 1920s, so that seems right to me, and a very fair price.
posted by ldthomps at 1:27 PM on August 17, 2016

Response by poster: So the finish that seems sprayed on fooled me into imagining this rolled off a conveyor belt in some massive reproduction factory in the 1980s. Thank you for setting me straight. I'm so happy and relieved! (That was not my house, these are yet to be delivered.)
posted by Dragonness at 2:47 PM on August 17, 2016

Agreed, looks refinished, which explains the lack of patina -- BUT don't take that as a flaw, they're very beautiful and if you bought them for their beauty you did really good for $300.
posted by AzraelBrown at 2:48 PM on August 17, 2016

A good buy at that price, refinished or not. Can't tell totally by the pictures but it doesn't look refinished to me. Check out Paine Furniture Co., Boston, which made a lot of furniture in this sort of style in the first half of the 20th C. You might find a label on the back or inside a drawer.
posted by beagle at 2:58 PM on August 17, 2016

Great pieces and you got them for a great price!

If you ever want a change, those kinds of pieces look great painted, especially in chalk paint, a kind of water-based paint with a soft matte finish that looks great on imperfect surfaces and tends to not need a lot of sanding before application.

Painting pieces like this can also increase their resale value on a site like Craigslist- here is a very similar buffet in NYC going for $975 (despite what looks to be a bent leg?) because someone spent a few hours carefully painting it with high-gloss paint and then marketed it nicely. High-gloss paint, admittedly, is annoying to work with (hard to get smooth coats as the gloss highlights imperfections in the wood surface and drips or lines in the paint job), but still, it probably only took them 6 hours to transform a $200 flea market find into a $1000 upsell- you could do this too and make a few hundred bucks!
posted by pseudostrabismus at 11:39 PM on August 17, 2016

Oh god whatever you do, DO NOT paint these. Please.

Once you paint wood furniture, you can't go back. It's painted forever (or if you strip it, the finish is ruined forever). It's fine to do for the sort of blocky particleboard & veneer 70s furniture you find at garage sales, but please don't ruin beautiful high quality furniture like this.
posted by Sara C. at 9:55 AM on August 18, 2016 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: I studied the pieces now I have them at home: they have the original paint on, but a layer of matte varnish was added on top of it. It looks good, I'm not going to mess with it further.
posted by Dragonness at 9:07 AM on August 30, 2016