Why the bottom has dropped out of the antiques market
economist.com
economist.com
For one thing, the article talks about antique furniture costing thousands or tens of thousands of dollars. Selling that to a crowd of debt-saddled Millennials on the basis of "social justice" is pretentious to the extreme. After all, my organic latte is already resting atop my bamboo yoga mat... so I've done my part.
More seriously though, I've always assumed that the antiques market is driven by nostalgia and longing for the past. The younger generation today seems to have very low levels of nostalgia and longing for the past. Specifically FOR "social justice" reasons.
Please don't get me wrong, I'm not making some absurd Tumblr argument that antique chairs are racist or anything. I'm just noting that less nostalgia for the past probably lowers the demand for antiques, and surely that plays a role alongside the supply rising due to Baby Boomer retirements.
I would imagine that they just don't have a past to long for because they are young.
I heard the same thing about my peers. And now we have Star Wars & NES games everywhere. I'd venture to say the younger generation's nostalgia is more for digital experiences & media than physical objects.
Finale:
"As for the appeal: Who, after all, can resist the fantasy of seeing what your parents were like before you were born, or when you were still little — too little to understand what the deal was with them, something we can only do now, in hindsight? And who, after having that privileged view, would want to dismiss the lives they led and world they inhabited as trivial — as passing fads, moments of madness? Who would still want to bash them, instead of telling them that we know they were bad but that now we forgive them?"
Note: this is similar to, but critically different than, the comments above. Mendelsohn's assertion is that the nostalgia is for the past lives of one's parents. How did they live? Who were they? Can we forgive them?
A couple of years after my grandmother passed away, my grandfather started dating again and he didn't realize that women who were decades his junior wouldn't have the same cultural touchstones that he does.
One time, he was trying to woo a woman who is only about three years older than me and he was shocked and mystified that the music of his young adulthood was annoying to her.
I asked him "Do you like listening to Benny Goodman and Count Basie? No. Well, that's what YOUR music sounds like to HER."
This is why I don't buy nice furniture. (Also, I move too much, and it's easier to sell and re-buy Ikea than paying to move heavy, well-built furniture).
If you have spent 40+ years saving every penny, you don't start spending when you retire, saving money has become part of your identity, not a mean to an end.
They spent months eating slightly rotten apples.
I can also not believe that there are sofas, for whatever price, that last a lifetime without expensive repairs to the cushions.
My lessons: (a) buying sofas is hard; (b) for me, nothing is forever; (c) it's hard to generalize about the wisdom of various furniture purchase strategies.
I have to agree with you there. Most of the stuff I've bought at IKEA I've had to reinforce using Gorilla glue and heavier screws so it won't fall apart within 6 months.
It helps, but I stopped buying their stuff after I graduated from college.
In the past I have bought Ikea stuff and I was pretty happy with it (the Poang chairs were a favorite of mine for a while). It worked well for me and was easy to sell on Craigslist when I was done with it.
You may decide you don't like that couch in five years, even if it's holding up well.
Of course there are ranges that are very very expensive, but not all are.
I am seeing the price of used watchmakers tools, and mechanical watches(Omega Seamaster, Tudor(a cheaper Rolex), and pretty much every high end watch go up in price. Hell, even Elgin's, and Bunrus watches are going up faster than I want.
I used to be able to go to EBay, and CL and scoop these watches, and tools up. Not anymore. I thought the smart watch would put an end to mechanical watches; so far it's been the absolute opposite, but might change if they ever get a smart watch so right--the people with money need to wear it?
As to furniture--I think it's just time? Why buy IKEA, when you can buy an antique that you can give to your kids? The IKEA will go to the Craigslist free curb route?
I take that back. Some of you would give a friend/relative an IKEA piece? My father once gave me his old underware. He meant well--I think? Oh, and his old Sears tube socks. They were so worn, the elastic strands were beyond broken--the polymers couldn't keep their positive/negative charge. I thought I could use them to polish my truck, but they just didn't even work for that. My dad meant well--just very frugal. Or, a fool? I haven't quite figured it all out?
You do repairs?! How does one PM here...
As a 31-year-old Millennial, I can tell you that nostalgia and longing for the past is very much alive and well among my peers.
It's just that all our nostalgia is concentrated on the '80s and '90s (probably more the first half of the '90s than anything else, but there's still some '80s and late '90s nostalgia mixed in there), and antique furniture is probably the very last thing you think of when you think of those decades.
An easy parallel can be seen here with clothes and furniture. While younger people won't be dropping 6 mil on the desk from the article, they might consider buying an antique, well-made, durable night table instead of its flimsy ikea counterpart if they know it'll last and won't morph into wobbly garbage in a year. Doubly true for Chinese knock offs and walmart brand items.
I've been on a quest to replace my bookshelves with stackable, glass fronted cases. Antiques are both cheaper and higher quality than modern, new furniture. (I also have too many desks at this point, but that's mostly a personal problem.)
>Antique furniture went mainstream in Europe in the second half of the 19th century, as the bourgeoisie found themselves with more disposable income and developed a desire to invest in their homes. The antique trade boomed in Paris and London. By 1890 Paris had 300 antique shops, up from 25 around 1850, says Manuel Charpy, a historian. But antiques, like clothes, go in and out of style. They boomed again in the 1950s and 1980s, when “period rooms” in a single nostalgic style were all the rage.
The upwardly mobile / striver class of middle class people with money to burn and a need to signal their social position is both smaller and made up differently than it was before. Instead of the traditional professional classes, we are in the age of the technician and skilled tradesman.
High-tech folk are dominated by engineers, a substantial portion of who hail from Asia. Their collecting tastes trend toward tech toys and away from European traditions. Skilled tradespeople are like a branch of applied engineers. Plumbers, electricians, gear heads and HVAC people tend to buy old cars, not 18th century furniture or silver service.
Also, people are less social than ever before, so status symbols shift. When you look at 3000 ft^2 homes, you see lots of fancy exterior stuff, and empty interiors. There's no stigma to owning a million dollar home and sitting on beanbags today.
In central London, a million dollar home is a one-bedroom flat: http://www.rightmove.co.uk/new-homes-for-sale/property-37648... (540ft^2)
I don't think there's room for things much larger than a beanbag there.
I live in a place that is basically an average US market. Here a $1M home is a legit mansion or a serious amount of land. A two-earner 200k household can afford a suburban 2,500-3,000 ft^2 on 0.1-0.25 acre in a development with a good school district. Something like this: (http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/55-Spruce-S...)
(Stoke-on-Trent will sell you a small terraced house for £1 on the condition that you have £30k to fix it. It's not exactly Detroit but it has suffered from the collapse of its traditional china plate industry.)
http://cloudinary.com/blog/10_startups_managing_images_in_th...
The E article points out the waning demand for certain genres and increasing demand for others. This can't be emphasized enough. Midcentury modern is what younger furniture shoppers seem to appreciate and it's reflected in the designs of the big box retailers like West Elm CB2. Their assessment of younger shoppers seems a bit off too, as outlets like the Washington Post and Apartment Therapy cite mixing old and new as one of the top 5 (!) design trends:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/home/apartment-ther...
We also think that consumers have moved away from these goods partly out of convenience (or lack thereof). Furniture is something you want touch (and smell) before you buy. You want to inspect its integrity. It's a market that doesn't lend itself to buying online, at a distance. At the same time, it's not particularly easy to shop locally either -- furniture dealers are not necessarily the most tech savvy and don't always have the resources for comprehensive marketing.
That's one of the reasons we built ATTIC -- to help aggregate and showcase local opportunities to buy antiques and vintage furniture from small businesses. In general, shopping local -- especially from small businesses -- is a difficult proposition when it's so easy to shop online. That's a problem that we think could use some solving.
However, there's one major difference in this market -- many of the classic midcentury modern designs are still being made. You can buy a brand new, fully authentic Series 7 or Eames Lounge Chair or many of the other things on my wife's shopping list.
And even new designs in the mid-century modern style do not have the same feel of inauthenticity that fake antiques do. Mid-century modern has always been mass-produced in a factory.
midcentury anything has been going strong for at least the past decade or more. It's not just furniture, but art, reel-to-reel recorders, record players, nearly anything that came from the 50's is gaining traction in nearly every niche you can think of.
The prices are starting to level out a little bit as well, making it more affordable. There's also a TON of retro shops where I live (Minneapolis) where you can get amazing MCM furniture. Places like http://findfurnish.com/ where you can get a very nice Danish Teak credenza for around $500.
And yes, I know, midcentury can be anything from the 30's on up through the 60's. It is a rather a broad category of time.
We didn't plan it this way. We just happen to live on a hobby farm, trying to live sustainably, and would rather keep our old furniture for both financial and family reasons.
Of course, this also proves the point of the article - even in a home furnished mostly with antiques, we aren't part of a market for it. Our antiques are functional objects in our life, not investments.
https://web.archive.org/web/19980430125559/http://www.archon...
20 years later and I'm more or less doing the same thing for the Swift Language:
http://www.h4labs.com/dev/ios/swift.html
Perhaps I should have taken the time to learn some design skills.
Nowadays, you can change every piece of furniture in the house for a few hundred bucks. There's constantly something new at IKEA, and you don't want to care if the kid scratches your dining table. You also want it to be easy to clean, and if you're moving house you can just throw out the old stuff.
It's also clearly very fashion-driven. Wait until everyone's gone IKEA modernist, and you'll see the pendulum start to swing back again.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/home/apartment-ther...
Plus, if you look at some of the most sought after stuff -- e.g., Anthropologie furniture -- it's all throw back to old era. It seems to be as much about the ways in which people shop (online vs at brick and mortar) as it is purely about changes in taste.
At my college (UT Dallas), we had on-campus apartments. Not dorms, but an actual apartment complex on campus.
The best place for new residents to acquire furniture was by the dumpsters. It turns out that most people moving out would just chuck half their furniture and leave it by the dumpster. Every year from May to August, there would be copious amounts of furniture at the dumpsters. If you were a new resident, you were quickly told that the best way to acquire a couch was to head over to the nearest dumpster and take what you see.
I attended UTD from 2003 to 2007; I don't know if things have changed since.
"Television programmes such as “Antiques Roadshow”, where octogenarians find out how much the contents of their attics are worth, reinforce the perception that antiques are for oldies."
to the contrary. i'm 40 - octogenarian around here - and the show has done nothing but increase my interest in old "things".
Recent record breaking sale of an omega speedmaster:
https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/omega-speedmaster-referenc...
And it wasn't even one that's been on the moon like this one:
https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/moon-watch-sells-for-$1mil...
"I feel like sitting on something a bit 1850s Paris this week, let's just slide this other couch to the storage room." Not happening unless you're very wealthy or very in debt.
You can also sell them to support your habit. A coworker does that with watches. He can usually sell them for at least as much as he purchased them for, and uses that money to change out his collection.
The really good pieces could be disassembled and reassembled (with basic tools) and when done looked like new.
Since the resurgence of the "distressed" look it's getting harder and harder to find good stuff since the market has exploded.
I think when I have the time I'll just borrow my friends workshop and build all my furniture for the current place since I'm mostly running with IKEA style stuff at the moment.