Courtesy Christie's

Buyers are willing to shell out big bucks for masterpieces like Thomas Chippendale’s 1764 breakfront, which brought $4 million at Christie’s this year. But the top sales are increasingly at auction, not from dealers.

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The antique English furniture market appears to be reeling. Beset by scandal, its products labeled “out of fashion” by shelter magazines, it is also losing two of its top dealers to retirement this year. Appearances can be deceiving, however. Take a quick look at the auction results in 2008—all is not lost. So far this season, Christie’s and Sotheby’s between them have sold more than $70 million worth of English furniture. At the former house, one session comprising just 12 lots made more than $20 million, and the latter’s Devenish auction—of material from the estate of the late, great New York dealer Tom Devenish—brought in $11.2 million. The Simon Sainsbury sale, dubbed “The Creation of an English Arcadia,” at Christie’s London, wasn’t all furniture or all English, but it presented a British look and made more than $30 million.

If the auction houses are so successful with this category, why is the market perceived to be so depressed? The John Hobbs affair is one reason. The high-end London dealer is accused of pawning off extremely expensive fakes as real, mostly Continental antiques, and the accuser is none other than his restorer. Not a confidence builder for buyers, to be sure, but ultimately Hobbs is only one man. The most damning aspect of the scandal was a quote in the New York Times article chronicling it, and the speaker wasn’t talking about fakes per se. A decorator characterized all antique furniture not sold by the charming Mr. Hobbs as “boring brown.” This is a cliché that lazy people use to dismiss a category with a rich and varied history. Anyone who studies the English furniture stock of Ronald Phillips, in London, or of Kentshire, in New York, will recognize that the description doesn’t do the field justice.

The shelter magazines are a different matter. To impress such arbiters, fashion, whether in clothing or interiors, needs to deliver a jolt, and Georgian sideboards are not new and exciting. All we can hope is that people will continue to think for themselves and not be guided solely by the pages of Elle Décor. Comfort can perhaps be drawn from the fact that since this material is never “in,” it also can’t go “out” again.

The top lots at the spring sales were reassuring. Someone was willing to pay £2.06 million ($4 million) for an exquisite 1764 George III breakfront by Thomas Chippendale that represented perhaps his best crafting of that form. If you had given me a few million dollars to buy a piece of furniture, that’s the one I would have bid on.

The retirement of the forces behind two pillars of London’s English furniture business in Lowndes Square—Michael and John Hill, of Jeremy, and Robin Kern, of Hotspur—is sad indeed. Although their departure was only a matter of time, it will leave a great hole. These two shops are family owned and run, and the second generation seldom wishes to carry on a business like this— frequently going off instead to sell pieces by Charles Evans and Marc Newson. Thus the antiques trade is losing dealers of great conviction who were able to wrest well-to-do private clients from the lures of the auction houses.

That, in fact, points to the major problem facing the English furniture world: A scarcity of product and high rents are making it tough for dealers and tipping the business toward the auction houses, which serve, in a way, as warehouses. Let me be clear— I have nothing against auctioneers. All dealers use them, even when they say they don’t. In fact, I’m selling some pieces this fall at both Christie’s and Sotheby’s. But in a healthy market, auction houses are only one venue. The specialists at Sotheby’s and Christie’s would tell you that themselves. Seasoned dealers, people who are in the fray year-round, are a key element in the mix.

Some people simply don’t like to buy at auction, preferring the personal attention of a shopkeeper. Collecting English furniture requires an eye, and getting an eye takes more than catalogue perusal. You can’t ascertain real quality at a glance. Dealers are available to educate buyers at any time, not just during sales. Auctions of English furniture, moreover, are getting scarcer. In the early 1980s the big houses usually held eight annually in New York between them; now there are four. In a strange way, Christie’s and Sotheby’s are sowing the seeds of their own destruction, at least as far as this market is concerned. Sales that come every six months are not enough to keep collectors interested in a field this arcane and detail-oriented over the long haul.