Near and Dear : Collecting Treasures From the Recent Past Is Wise for : Practical and Emotional Reasons
You may have missed buying Mission furniture and Art Deco pieces for a few hundred dollars in the early 1970s, and that Tiffany lamp you could have had for $75 in 1969 is long gone, but don’t despair.
Think about collecting furniture and accessories created closer to today’s date. It’s a good bet that at local consignment stores, swap meets, garage sales and auctions, there are little Cinderella-like bargains just waiting to be dusted off and looked at in a new way. What’s destined to be the next collectible trend? No one knows for sure, but it’s easy to suppose that just as “Maverick” and “The Flintstones” are huge nostalgic successes, so will be the furniture, accessories and rugs from the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s.
The reasons for collecting items from the immediate past are both practical and emotional. The high prices of 18th-Century pieces and their relative scarcity makes collecting them a rich person’s game.
It used to be believed that anything before 1825 was handcrafted and therefore of quality, but that after 1825 the Industrial Revolution and its machines lowered quality and true artistic value.
Using this definition, true antiques had to be at least 100 years old in 1925. You are obviously not going to run into these pieces at a garage sale. And many of these items don’t relate to the way we live today, with our smaller spaces and lack of time (or servants) to maintain ornate silver, crystal and heavy wooden furniture.
Today’s collectors are more emotional buyers, purchasing what they really like, not what someone has decreed they should like.
Pieces are purchased not only because of their beauty and craftsmanship (or lack thereof), but also because of their sentimental value. Many collectors are young, so items from the ‘40s and ‘50s hark back to a time when life seemed simpler but still accessible.
These old things are being used in a new ways, though. Living rooms have decorative ceramics and jars that were once found in kitchens; pine furniture is prized for the paint peeling off, and old fabric remnants and Spanish shawls and serapes are thrown over chairs to cover worn spots.
More and more, collectors are looking to America and especially California for inspiration in decor, not to a European life they’ve never lived. Hence, American country is hot, with its aged furniture and chipped pottery, as is the country-Western funk look with Pendleton blankets, ‘40s tea towels and tablecloths and cowboy dishes. What seem to be on the horizon are both a Deep South look and the cozy atmosphere of a country or beach cottage.
“I see a resurgence of the cottage look,” said Wendi Young, interior designer with Kitchens Del Mar in Corona del Mar. “People like a warm look of comfortable furniture, aged kitchen cabinet doors, bright colors and accessories from the recent past.”
Kitty Sue Pease, president of the Santa Monica Antique Market Dealers Assn. and a dealer, agrees. “We’re not refinishing as we used to. Now we want to show the scars of a piece without it being touched up. I call it the ‘faded glory’ look. You see beauty in things that other people don’t and make it your own. Find what look is right for you.”
Some of the trends that Pease sees in collecting are pieces of garden furniture, metal plant boxes, plant stands and even old, rusty iron accessories used both inside and out. “I used to be selling ceramic cows, and now it’s flowers and flower-related objects,” she said. And flowers are seen everywhere: painted on canvas slipcovers, plopped in pitchers doubling as vases, sewn on fabrics tossed over chairs.
Other hot new collectibles are old typewriters, plastic radios, chintz china from the 1920s and anything that is California-style. California style includes pottery made here--such as Catalina pottery and Brayton ware made in Laguna Beach, plein air and other landscape and floral paintings, handcrafted tiles and arts and crafts items.
Objects from California that were made during the ‘30s and ‘40s are especially sought after.
“People today are seeing the ‘30s and ‘40s as long enough ago to make the pottery and the furniture collectible,” Pease said. (With the decline in cigarette smoking, ashtrays seem destined to be rare objects in the future.)
Blond maple furniture by Heywood Wakefield is becoming collectible. It was designed in the ‘50s in a spare, streamlined way that fits in with the ‘90s idea of a return to natural materials. Chairs by Eero Saarinen and Charles and Ray Eames are also prized and can still sometimes be found for reasonable prices. They’re mindful of the modernist time in the ‘30s and ‘40s when industry and art seemed like a perfect match.
As an example, the molded plywood chair, table and screens introduced by the Eameses in 1946 came from designs for stretchers and leg splints they developed during World War II.
Saarinen’s 1948 mass-produced fiberglass “womb” chair came into being when he found the surface of early fiberglass products too rough. Although we’ve encountered similar chairs in waiting rooms throughout the world, used singly they make a design statement.
Designing using a “retro” look can be fun and not horribly expensive. Formica and metal kitchen sets in bright colors, heavy metal toasters and other appliances, McCoy pottery and flower pots and funky lamps in bright colors create a cheerful look for today’s smaller kitchens or dining rooms.
Living rooms with used, over-stuffed furniture, colorful plastic lamps and ceramic collectibles are inviting and can even be humorous.
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Especially when bought at swap meets and garage sales, these offbeat items can be inexpensive, running tens of dollars rather than thousands.
“Since these things aren’t expensive, you can turn them into something else,” Pease said. “Some fun ideas in lighting are to make lamps out of old sports trophies, birdhouses, statues and other things. People are also painting and decorating lamp shades with bangles and beads to fit their color schemes. Using your imagination, you can turn unusual mantels into headboards, make shelves out of old picket fences, have aged windows become mirror frames, shutters become paintings and architectural pieces like corbels or brackets become individual book stands.”
The ‘90s may well go down as the time when home decor became truly individualistic due to economic necessity and interest in recycling and reusing.
Because it’s impossible to know if that rusty garden watering can will one day be valuable, it’s much better just to enjoy it now and forget the investment value.
Most collectibles have two values anyway, the monetary one and that of the emotional enjoyment. If you buy something because you love it, you will get your money’s worth. And old chairs, rugs, dishes and other household items are usually less costly to buy and tend to hold their value better than new ones.
And who knows, you may be as lucky as the person who bought a Shaker chair in 1972 for $125 that was worth $500 in 1982, $1,650 in 1989 and $4,675 today.