The Death of Brown Furniture | Are Antiques Too Pricey or Have They Just Gone Out of Style?

On this fine, breezy August afternoon under the white tent behind Ron Bourgeault’s auction house in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Lot 577 has come home for the day.

Lot 577 is a tall secretary desk in mahogany and flame birch capped with three brass finials. Made sometime between 1800 and 1815, it belonged to Thomas G. Moses, a Portsmouth tailor. It’s as poised and taut as a thoroughbred.

Back in 2004, Moses’s elegant desk had found its way to Rockefeller Center in New York City, one lot in Christie’s auction of “important American furniture,” among other things. The prestigious auction house sold it for $59,750 plus a buyer’s premium of almost 20 percent, bringing the final price to more than $71,000.

Fourteen years later, Lot 577 is back home in Portsmouth as part of Bourgeault’s Summer Weekend Auction. A bidder on the phone will take it home for just $12,000 plus a buyer’s premium of $2,400. Moses was in debt when he died; his desk has followed his slide, its market value falling almost 80 percent. In the years between those two auctions in New York and Portsmouth, the antiques world has been turned on its head.

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The headlines have been sounding the alarm for a few years now: “Memo to Par­ents: The Kids Don’t Want Your Furniture” (The Denver Post). “That Perfect Dining Table? No One Wants It, Even If It’s Free” (The Wall Street Journal). “The Recline and Fall of Antique Furniture” (Financial Times). Brown furniture, it is solemnly announced, is dead.

An industry term, “brown furniture” takes in grandfather clocks and Federal-style desks that once belonged to Portsmouth tailors as well as slumped couches and coffee tables scratched like hockey rink ice. All of it is in the same police lineup: the better-made department store furniture, the glued-together laminate office desk, and real pieces of craftsmanship, chairs and chests that have dignity, sure form, and proportion. If the furniture is brown, it’s guilty. It’s not wanted. “Dark brown furniture gives the younger generation the willies just to look at it,” says Julie Hall, aka “the Estate Lady,” a North Carolina professional who has helped thousands of clients dissolve or downsize family estates.

Also not wanted: china, china cabinets, crystal goblets, silver tea sets, pianos, bureaus, sideboards, and collectible figurines, such as Hummels. Formal is out; “mid-20th-century casual” is in, such as colorful plates and kitchen tables from the 1950s.

Flea markets and secondhand stores are running from the word antique. A once-hot Manhattan antiques fair held each January has dropped “Antiques” from its title; now it’s just the Winter Show. (When it was founded in 1955, it wouldn’t accept pieces that were less than 100 years old. No longer.) Well-known New Jersey antiques dealer David Rago has created “Rago Remix” auctions dedicated to “timeless style” that mix the “contemporary + classic.” Rather than trying to sell pieces to collectors dedicated to one style, a Rago Remix sale might feature a Louis XVI–style gilded chair alongside a contemporary abstract painting, a folksy 19th-century sponge-painted pine blanket chest, and vintage Louis Vuitton luggage. Vintage is the key. One 25-year-old auction house worker ran a quick test, sending her friend photos of similar old tables, one labeled antique and the other vintage. Which would she buy? Vintage won.

Vintage wares are also crowding out antiques at the thrice-yearly Brimfield Antique Show in Massachusetts, collectors say, but that change may be what draws 250,000 to America’s largest and most famous outdoor antiques show. At one small New Hampshire antiques show I visited, the 55 dealers easily outnumbered the shoppers. There was some activity in the morning but not enough to sustain an entire day. It was deserted. Dealers sat by their booths, either staring off into space or fighting off sleep.

The dealers still “love the stuff,” but the market has caved in. This is due, they say, to some wide-ranging factors: Americans are losing their sense of history, because it’s not being taught as much in schools. Many people are downsizing their overstuffed baby-boomer households. House interiors have changed: Going, going, gone are dining rooms, the big cabinet/armoire with the TV, shelves for books—and books, as well.

The next generation of buyers—the millennials—is missing. They have big student loans and little money. Young people just starting out will grab some Ikea furniture and move on. (“Ikea” sounds ominous the way the dealers snarl it, as though it’s a malevolent force.) Ikea could be called “fast furniture,” which itself is modeled on fast food and fast fashion. We can buy cheap shirts and cheap chairs. Use it and put it out by the curb. Pay someone $20 to take it off our hands.

Millennials come in for scorn from the dealers I meet. Millennials don’t want things; they want “experiences,” according to opinion surveys. Many dealers are befuddled by this attitude as well as by millennials’ texting and tweeting. Antiques are not easily translated to the digital realm. They’re not part of the point-and-click universe. They’re not Instagrammable. Look at us on this brown couch! And look at this thumbtack Windsor chair from 1825 in faded yellow paint. It has such a rich “patina,” the touch of history. Nope. That’s just a worn-out old chair.

To the younger generation, antique furniture is just “grungy,” according to Hollie Davis and Andrew Richmond, Ohio antiques experts in their early 40s who write “The Young Collector” column for Maine Antique Digest. “Remember those guys your kids listened to in high school, the ones with the scruffy beards, unwashed hair, and ratty flannel? They did not look clean. Neither, to your kids, does furniture with ‘surface,’” they wrote in one recent column. One generation’s “patina” is another’s beat-up chair.

And antiques hunting takes time. You have to see these things in person, compare qualities that aren’t easily compared. You’re looking for soulful objects. Things with a presence—grace, wit, even a winning ungainliness. Antiquing is a domestic quest, a search to complete a jigsaw puzzle that can never be finished. Fewer people have the leisure to spend days searching for one more Dedham Pottery plate to add to their collection.

Only furniture from the 1940s to the 1960s has escaped, what is now called midcentury modern: spindly Scandinavian furniture and designs by modernist architects. There are waiting lists for things you may have grown up with in doctor’s waiting rooms, schools, and dorms. (Just as a previous generation grew up hating arts and crafts furniture—dorm furniture!—before Gustav Stickley was rediscovered in the 1970s.)

This generation of antiques dealers has been in the business 40 or 50 years, since they were in their teens, when some piece of the past caught their eye. They remember the joy of the chase, the great finds, the big sales, the noisy bazaar of crowded antiques fairs. But many have closed up their shops, winnowed down the shows they do, shifted to the Internet. Mostly it seems they are disbelieving. The world has changed—now what? They’ve never seen anything like this sudden lurching in the antiques market, in taste, in the world of things. “How Low Will Market for Antiques Actually Go?” asked a New York Times headline in 2018. Ron Bourgeault may know. He’s 72 years old. He’s been selling antiques since he was 8.

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Bourgeault’s antiquing résumé reaches back to his earliest memories. When he was 7 he set up a toy antiques shop at home in his basement. An elderly woman, whom he used to talk to on his way to school, died and left him a small pile of her treasures. He brought it home in his little red wagon. The next year he entered the trade. An “old-time antiques dealer” named Hyman Webber had a shop in Bourgeault’s hometown, Hampton, New Hampshire. “I walked into his shop and said I wanted a job,” Bourgeault says. And with that, the 8-year-old was hired for $1 a day. “I would get in the green pickup truck with him and just had the best time. And the wonderful thing was, he taught me. I just listened to everything he told me.”

This set the pattern for Bourgeault’s life. He’s had a series of apprenticeships, and he learned from each one. Like many good salesmen, he’s a skilled observer of people’s behavior. For a lifetime he’s stood in front of a room or his booth at an antiques show, courting desire, need, and acquisition. At age 10 he was selling at an auction. He was assisting Webber, holding up items for sale. “I was holding up a vase—I’ll never forget it—it sold for a $1.75. And he looked down at me—he used to sit up on a sort of a pedestal on a stool—and he said, ‘Get up here and sell the rest of the auction.’”

After that, Bourgeault was the youngest dealer ever to have a booth at the annual New Hampshire Antiques Show. He was 14. By the time he was in his mid-20s he was the president of the New Hampshire Antique Dealers Association.

He had other teachers, among them colorful and revered auctioneers, who taught him that a successful auction is a good show. That’s how he ran his auctions. “People came from Beacon Hill with their thermoses of martinis and sandwiches with the crusts cut off, and we would just entertain them. We would have every single piece of furniture or small [item] held up. We would have young football players holding up highboys. And when they were holding up the cast-iron Franklin stove, I would tell a joke to see how long they could hold it up. And it was pure entertainment.” He had their attention.

Those were good years for antiques, starting in the prosperous 1960s. The veterans, home from World War II, were established. They had their families and suburban houses. On weekends, they’d pile into the family station wagon to go antiquing. “And you know, Dad collected pewter and Mother collected Sandwich glass. Johnny would collect banks and Susie would collect dollhouse furniture, and they would go from one shop to the next,” says Bourgeault. “The whole family was out antiquing.”

With the Bicentennial in 1976, antiques prices began a steady ascent. For the next 30 years, antiques went “up and up and up in value,” says Bourgeault. Record prices for the rarest antiques pushed up the price of everything else.

Antiques had a long run, but by the time the stock market crashed in 2008, interest in antiques was already fading. “In 2008 a lot of people who had bought antiques for investment needed to sell, and they found that they weren’t that liquid an asset,” he says.

Prices fell, gradually at first. Today, antiques at the high end of the market—“except for the very, very top”—sell for 70 percent less than at the peak, and the low end is off 90 percent, Bourgeault says. “A desk that was $4,500, you can now buy for $450.” There are exceptions, like fine Chinese ceramics and good American folk art, he notes, and prices have risen a little lately for some items. It’s a great time to buy, he says. “I’m tired of ‘brown wood is dead.’ It’s an opportunity. It’s affordable. It’s cheaper than Ikea.” At the same Summer Weekend Auction that sees that $60,000 desk sell for 20 percent of its former price, Lot 605, a Massachusetts Queen Anne mahogany drop-leaf dining table, four foot square when opened, sells for just $900.

Andrew Richmond of “The Young Collector” agrees. He and his wife also once bought “useful” furniture, but “now we are looking at what we like,” Richmond says. “The perception of antiques is that they are expensive. But one of the reasons we have brown furniture is it’s affordable. So it works out.” (They will admit, however, that “a lot of our friends don’t have things like we do in our house.”)

Richmond feels more optimistic than many in the antiques world do. “We have met a lot of younger folk, and they are getting excited because it’s a good time to buy,” he says. “It’s always a pendulum. Putting a timeline on it is impossible. I think we will see an uptick with the next generation. They will still need someplace to store their socks. And, after all, you can’t get any greener than antiques.”

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What changed? For Bourgeault it comes down to two words, romance and patriotism, and those two words are entwined. The old antiques collectors were romancing the past. They were conjuring the spirit of patriots like George Washington and Paul Revere. “According to the antiques dealers, George Washington slept in more beds than he had days in his life,” Bourgeault says. But that was a story their customers wanted to hear. Selling antiques is storytelling. When songwriter Henry C. Work called a tall case clock a “grandfather clock” in 1876, and sold a million copies of the sheet music, he paid the rent for generations of auctioneers.

And when Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote about Paul Revere’s midnight ride, he created a market. Paul Revere’s silver is still worth three times as much as his father’s because of that one poem, says Bourgeault. If you buy a Paul Revere bowl, you’re buying the American Revolution. “That was the romance of the antiques business, which has somehow been lost.”

People loved antiques because it spoke to them of a past they were proud of, a history they saw as exceptional. After World War II “there was great patriotism,” says Bourgeault, and that war “made us all Americans.” He remembers Memorial Day parades that went on for hours, with so many veterans marching. Once he read the Gettysburg Address at the cemetery; another time, “In Flanders Fields.” Everyone, whether a recently arrived immigrant or an old blue-blood family, had “fought like George Washington and Paul Revere.” They were patriots, all. “It’s been a lot of first-generation Americans who really appreciated antiques,” he says, noting collectors who have filled rooms in major museums, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

At his Summer Weekend Auction, Bourgeault is proud of Lot 566, a portrait of a soldier from the War of 1812, John Langdon Eastman. The portrait has come straight from Eastman’s descendants, along with two military commissions, one signed by Thomas Jefferson and the other by James Madison and James Monroe. “That’s goose bumps,” Bourgeault says. At auction, all he says is that this “beautiful portrait” is “one of the nicest I’ve ever seen.” It sells quickly for $9,000, just under his pre-auction estimate.

To its buyer, this is a good portrait of a soldier, but it’s also part of a bigger story that’s now being lost. “The world goes so much faster, faster, faster,” says Bourgeault. Memorial Day, that shared story of sacrifice, has become just another three-day holiday. When we have lost interest in the old stories, all we have is brown furniture.

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What we’re talking about is the lives of things, this other, sometimes parallel universe of the furniture, cookware, and art in our homes and public buildings. “Objects preserve memories. But the converse is also true,” author Laurel Thatcher Ulrich once wrote. “Without memories, ordinary objects end up in flea markets or trash bins.” A retired Harvard professor and a past president of the American Historical Association, Ulrich won the Pulitzer Prize for A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785–1812, which brought readers into intimate contact with life on the Maine frontier. But it was in a later book, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth, that Ulrich dived deep into the history of common household objects. She has a sure sense of the sometimes strange lives of the objects around us.

She, too, used to go antiquing. As a young mother, she visited small antiques shops to furnish her house with country pieces, including six golden oak chairs she bought for $5. “It was cool to us that it was really cheap. So we grew up with that kind of stuff.”

What’s hot now, she knows from some of her family: “They’re just totally fascinated with midcentury modern. Danish modern, for example, which was really cool in the ’60s. It’s now cool again. And I look at a lot of the midcentury modern and think, Oh, those were things I threw out, or Those were things I never could afford.

“If you look at anything that’s survived, it’s almost always lost its luster and kind of gone underground for a while. And then sometimes it’s rediscovered as something really important,” she says. “We can change the past more than we can change the future.” 

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All these things that we handle sometimes daily, they’re everywhere one day, and then the next, they vanish or survive only in museums and antiques shops. It’s a magician’s trick that happens in daylight, before us all, and we never figure it out.

When we look at old photos of men dressed in starched collars and women in long, tight-waisted dresses, we know that taste changes. But just when and why does it happen? Who was the last man to dress for work downtown in a straw boater? Who was the last family to hitch up the horse and wagon to go to the store, only to leave their horse alongside a row of black Model T’s? When exactly did this happen?

Taste is ever changing. Clothes and furniture (and ideas) have their fashion turns. We are living in such a moment now. In a blink, many people have lost interest in antiques. “There is no more remarkable psychological element in history than the way in which a period can suddenly become unintelligible,” G.K. Chesterton wrote in 1904. “To the early Victorian period we have in a moment lost the key…. The thing always happens sharply: a whisper runs through the salons … and a whole generation of great men and great achievement suddenly looks mildewed and unmeaning.” And a whole heap of brown furniture sits unsold.

We’re having a Chesterton moment. Aging baby boomers looking to downsize are facing their children’s rejection of their Royal Doulton china, Grandma’s silver, and even the family photo albums. To their children, all this stuff is “mildewed and unmeaning.”

Waking up to this rejection is like hitting air turbulence, the bad kind where the plane rises and drops, rises and drops. And you feel the disconcerting separation of yourself from your seat and the plane, feel the drop in your gut before you can think about it. Your generation’s treasures are treasured no more. Old things are being left behind; other old things are being rediscovered. Each generation honors its own antiques. What you think is ugly may one day be treasured. We choose what we want from the past—or we choose nothing at all.

Words to the Wise: It’s All About Small Doses

Kelly McGuill is one of New England’s best-known interior designers. She advises homeowners not to ignore brown furniture—especially now, in a buyer’s market—but instead to appreciate how it can enhance even the most modern interiors.

“In my home and my clients’ homes, I always strive for contrasts. The best spaces are ones that have a mix of old and new, shiny and dull, and always something that can’t be purchased in the big-box stores.

“I love adding [antiques] to homes in small doses. Your living room doesn’t need to have all the pieces that were bequeathed to you by Aunt Bessie; however, that roll-down desk would look amazing in a living room or bedroom with white walls and some other, very simple pieces.

“Some of my favorite designers have been doing this forever. Darryl Carter, for example, a designer in Washington, D.C., regularly adds these ‘brown furniture’ pieces to his home and the homes of clients. At times, he goes one step further with these finds by painting them. They become coveted by many.

“I believe that as with so many things, if you wait a bit, that brown mahogany grandfather clock that doesn’t really feel like your style today will grow on you tomorrow.”