At A.THERIEN, a gallery in Cairo, New York, the clean lines of a 1780s workman’s bed speak across time to a 1954 Tonneau chair by Pierre Guariche.
PHOTO BY STEPHEN ELLWOOD

STORY BY KEVIN WEST

Handcrafted in New England by independent master artisans! Made with sustainably harvested hardwoods and zero-VOC finishes! Available in a range of classic styles for timeless interiors! Sturdy enough for kids, dogs, and weekend visitors! Best of all, for a limited time only, all prices have been slashed!

Is it a new eco-collection beloved by design junkies? Nope. It’s early American furniture, an underappreciated category of good old-fashioned antiques, the stuff of weekend jaunts to cluttered roadside shops and country auctions. Crafted in New England between roughly 1700 and 1820, early furniture has what money can’t buy: integrity and authentic American heritage. At best, American antiques show an admirable unity of form and function; they are honest in material and design. Burnished by centuries of gentle use, the simple lines appeal to an eye—like mine—trained on Hans Wegner and Jean Prouvé. And because early American furniture is deeply out of fashion for no good reason other than the vagaries of taste, it represents great value for savvy and self-confident buyers.

“I’m an avid collector,” said Clare de Boer, chef-owner of Stissing House in Pine Plains, New York. “I’m well and truly obsessed.” De Boer bought at auction to furnish her restaurant in a restored 18th-century tavern and took home choice examples of favorite early American forms, such as camelback sofas, Windsor chairs, “austere” Federal sideboards, and supremely simple Shaker one-drawer stands (akin to modern end tables). At Stissing House, she created a full-immersion historical experience to “transport you to another time,” she said, but at home de Boer avoids colonial cosplay by contrasting early furniture with contemporary pieces. None of the old stuff is off-limits to her three young boys, either. “The thing about antiques,” she confided, “is how incredibly well made they are.”

De Boer and her husband, entrepreneur Luke Sherwin, loved early American style so much they even launched a furniture company, Roseland, inspired by its craftsmanship and solid-wood construction.

In previous generations, collectors and auctioneers went batty for “Americana,” to use the fusty name for our nation’s homegrown furniture and decorative arts. Jackie Kennedy installed elegant Federal antiques in the White House with help from decorator Sister Parish. The market peaked sometime between Ronald Reagan’s inauguration and Y2K. Back then, decorators and trophy hunters bid up bonnet-top highboys and claw-foot tea tables. So-called formal furniture—the high-style, high-polish trappings of rich colonial governors, merchants, and planters—was considered by connoisseurs equal to the best Old World craftsmanship and symbolic of patriotic pride in American ingenuity. In 1989, Texas billionaire Robert Bass dropped $12.1 million (over $30 million in today’s dollars) for a 1760 mahogany desk-bookcase by cabinetmaker John Goddard of Newport, Rhode Island.

Then tastes changed. The antiques-loving style of design mavens such as Albert Hadley and Mark Hampton was pushed aside by modernism in its many expressions: midcentury everything, Scandi-Japanese mindful minimalism, ersatz Axel Vervoordt eclectic organic brutalism, and, for those of more recherché taste, the immaculate restraint of Jean Prouvé and Charlotte Perriand. Prices for Americana collapsed, not just at the top of the market, but all the way down. They have yet to recover, meaning there’s never been a better time to buy—although dealers tell me that a new generation of collectors in their 40s and even younger have started to dip in. A few years back, at the bottom of the market, I saw a nice set of eight restored Chippendale ribbon-back dining chairs knocked down at Stair Galleries in Hudson, New York, for $1,500; they had sold in the 1990s for $15,000. It’s routine at auctions to see early American furniture go for one-quarter to one-third its price 20 years ago.

But value is not the prime reason I collect New England furniture—for me, it’s all about the look. With bold forms and patinated surfaces, early antiques have great appeal in a room, especially when showcased in silhouette. To see how design pros handle early American material, refer to the Hudson Valley hotel Inness, where style guru Taavo Somer hauled in 18th-century gateleg dining tables, tripod tavern tables, and ladder-back chairs. In New York City, beloved restaurateurs Rita Sodi and Jody Williams decorated The Commerce Inn as a paean to 19th-century American taste. And the trending upstate real estate company This Old Hudson, known for its signature home styling and the drop-dead listing photos on its website, punctuates its country-perfect décor with Chippendale chairs and Queen Anne chests.

For the most discerning new take on old furniture, I drive over to A.THERIEN gallery in Cairo, New York. In a gorgeous light-filled barn, owner Stephen Ellwood arranges powerful, almost abstract tableaux to create inspiring juxtapositions—and draw out surprising connections—between centuries. “The backbone of what I do is American vernacular and modernism,” explained Ellwood, who has the eye of an art director and the soul of a scholar. “The clientele here is design-focused. Their entry point may have been Jean Prouvé, Charlotte Perriand, and George Nakashima, but I’ve seen them embrace humble vernacular design. It’s a zeitgeist.”

Ellwood’s curatorial project is to refute a misconception that modernity began with Arts and Crafts or with Bauhaus or at 1900 or at some other fixed date. In his view, experiments with rationally attenuated forms began long ago in forgotten furniture shops in rural America. He pulled up a picture on his phone to show me a low-slung bed from the 1780s made by an anonymous rural genius who refined the commonplace form into a daringly elegant object. “Vernacular furniture embodies the essence of the creator,” he told me. “Each piece is as distinctive as a fingerprint or snowflake.”

A quick overview of the field: the oldest surviving American tables, chairs, and chests were made before 1700, during the so-called Pilgrim century, and have the oaken look of Jacobean England. For the next 120 years, furniture makers continued to glance back across the Atlantic for design cues. Styles shifted across a century. First came William and Mary (a courtly baroque look with boldly turned legs), followed by Queen Anne (thin curvaceous or “cabriole” leg), Chippendale (a more “masculine” straight leg or the fancy ball-and-claw foot), and elegant Federal, the last of which is sometimes subdivided into square-legged Hepplewhite style and round-legged Sheraton. Each style originated in England and reached America via status-conscious cities such as Newport, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, where clientele sought the grandeur of furniture made from expensive imported mahogany.

As styles slowly made their way up the Connecticut River Valley, the Hudson Valley, and into the New England hinterlands, furniture became plainer and more functional along the way. Country artisans selected maple, cherry, walnut, and wide-plank pine from local forests. To a collector, country furniture expresses the maker’s unique eye and handiwork. A set of late 18th-century New England dining chairs I have derives from Thomas Chippendale’s ornate 1754 originals, but only as distant echoes, as if they were made by a village craftsman who had heard rumors of London fashion but had never seen it firsthand.

The elegant forms of Federal furniture were further refined by Shaker craftsmen who pared away ornament to express their spiritual ideals. In time, Shaker style directly influenced Hans Wegner and other postwar Danish designers, drawing a straight line, as it were, from New England craftsmanship of 200 years ago to midcentury modernism.

Pro tip for your next antiquing trip: age-darked “original surfaces” are valued by collectors, meaning refinished pieces that reveal the wood’s original vibrancy can be had on the cheap. Painted furniture is usually monochrome, and the deeply saturated colors of traditional milk paint—robin’s egg, mustard, copper green, and oxblood—take on a soulful patina with time.

When decorating with early American antiques, the key to avoiding house-museum vibes is to mix and match across centuries. No single period has a monopoly on great design. “You can put a Federal sideboard next to a Windsor chair next to a rustic cabinet to create so much excitement and tension just within American styles,” said de Boer. But that’s just the start.

“I love putting an abstract expressionist painting next to a painted cupboard,” said Warren Battle, who sells 19th-century painted furniture, lighting from the 1940s, modern studio pottery by Paula Greif, abstract paintings, and whatever else catches his eye at Battle Brown on Warren Street in Hudson, New York. “It’s unexpected but very pleasing.”

Battle offers newbie collectors the most sensible advice: Trust your eye, buy what you love, and let each piece be its true historic self. “It’s 200 years old and living its life,” said Battle, pointing to a delightfully age-worn table in his shop. “Let the patina speak. If you want something perfect, go to Pottery Barn.” B