1940s Quality

Here's a fun discussion. My customer contacted me to refinish a dining room set his wife recently inherited. She had grown up with it in her parents home. Since then it had been refinished in a darker color, but it needed that kind of special attention again. A dining room table with two leaves, six chairs including a captain's chair, and a matching 4-drawer, 2-door buffet finished out the set. All of it is made of solid hard maple--no veneers our core woods anywhere!

All these dining room jewels (below) were made by the Haywood-Wakefield Furniture Company in the late 1930s through the mid -1960s. They have the signature 40s-60s look. Not everyone is going to appreciate it.

When it comes to "appreciating" the style that distinguishes a period, it helps to do some homework. In this situation this is
an heirloom set that my customer loves being around. It doesn't have 21st century contemporary lines or color, but the quality of these pieces--the wood and workmanship--is second to none...and it's highly collectible. The table and chairs, for example, are well worth $1400 and the buffet is probably valued at or around half that price in and of itself...as is. You may be able to find debatably "nicer" contemporary pieces in today's furniture market, but never this quality combination of wood and workmanship. Just ask the piece--if it could only answer for ALL to hear--and it would tell us, with it's chest puffed way up, all about it's glorious past!

My customers wanted this sweet combination returned to it's past glory. For them that meant I needed to research the original color and patina and know how I could replicate them. They wanted all the pieces to look just the way she remembered the set when she was a little girl. So, that's exactly what we did. We had to begin by doing OUR homework.

What you see below us what the respective pieces looked like before any work was done. I'll soon update this post with a picture of the finished dining set. In the meantime my customer is having the chair seats redone in "original" patterns.

That's Wood Talkin for today. Please keep listening, because wood really does have a story to tell!

Dick

Danish Ingenuity

When was the last time you saw or sat at a table like this? You may not have known it was one of these. Danish in design and ingenuity, it expands and shrinks by sliding the end sections out from under or back under the center section. There are no gears or locks; it's all slip action and easy...ingenious.

This antique beauty has a dual pedestal base. It's all solid oak. It was probably a proprietory clear varnish on this oak. It appears to be a shellac now. It's elegant and simple and very special. This one came to the shop to make a minor but complicated adjustment in how the closure fit on one end.

Probably influenced by time and some predictable shrinkage, the curvature on one side of it's "leaf" didn't tightly match the corresponding rounded corner of the center piece's rounded edge. (see the pic) We did not completely eliminate the gap, but we were able to almost close it...almost. It looks much better! What do you think? (Right, how it looked before; left, how it is now)

Ok. That's Wood Talkin for today. Keep listening. This is fun!

Dick