Why Are Antiques So Cheap? Because Everyone Lives in the Kitchen
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
We are most likely going to have to get rid of it when she downsizes. My brother and I are unsure where we would ever put it and neither of us play the piano (probably one of my bigger regrets is not learning...). Neither of us want a 4,000SF house especially in New England where 4,000SF probably means older house and lots of maintenance from weather over many years.
Similar problem with the antique dining room and the billiard table (though I may try and save that one if I can).
It's never too late!
(But the grand piano still won't be practical even if you learn how to play it.)
To the right buyer that instrument will be worth a small fortune. The reason the market value is not that high is mostly because the few big names gobble up all the instruments they can to reduce the size of the secondary market so they can sell their instruments at the highest price they'll fetch.
That's also why there are hardly ever prices on the websites of the various sellers, they would give a hint about what the instruments value is which would make it harder for them to purchase instruments for a small fraction of their true value.
Is that really a thing? Seems like a great way to lose money.
It's like how brand names manufacture "competing" store brand products right next to their brand name stuff.
So by making use of the information disparity, and manipulating the perception of the used market, it should be possible to keep prices artificially high.
The same kind of strategy works for diamonds at least, where “used” diamonds are not worthy of usage, so prices are simply set by the businesses; I know the video game market is also trying to get in on it, by gobbling up used games (eg through gamestop), keeping them out of the secondary market early (by encouraging sequels, trade-ins, etc), which then lets them set the prices on them later (particularly useful when you want to sell emulated games on the e-shops)
And ofc, if you the adversarial company are purchasing out these rare sales as soon as they’re up, you can trivially maintain the illusion.
That individual sale might cost you more, but if the average seller sells for less because they don’t see a real market to sell in... it’s probably still a profitable illusion.
It still seems strange to me that this would work, when there are so many easy ways for piano enthusiasts to gather and communicate, and when it's such an expensive item (so if you knew the market was being manipulated, you wouldn't just throw up your hands and accept the hit, you'd look for a better deal).
I might be getting confused about the basic claim being made, though -- if sellers can achieve decent prices when they choose to demand them, but often don't realise this and therefore get ripped off by professional buyers; and if buyers can save money by buying directly from individual sellers, but are often unaware of this option (because there aren't a whole lot of pianos being sold this way, and they're not on the market for long); then I guess that does make sense.
It seems like this would be really hard to pull off, though, because apparently they're simulateneously keeping prices artificially low.
I can see them keeping the casual buyer and seller ignorant of each other's existence -- especially if they're fixing up the pianos and selling them as 'certified refurbished' (or whatever), so they're not simply buying low and selling the exact same product high.
But wouldn't the whole thing crumble when a few enthusiasts got together and discussed their experiences as buyers and sellers -- or when a few sellers (whether through ignorance or knowledge) publically and successfully held out for higher prices?
Vintage Steinways often sell for roughly $20K. This price may include a lot of prep work by the dealer -- a dealer might replace all the strings, for example. I once visited a shop where the dealer gutted the instruments and more or less rebuilt them from scratch.
It's also reasonably common for dealers to have prices on their websites for used pianos. Not new pianos -- typically manufacturer contracts forbid this, and it's a high margin business.
I'd estimate that one could probably sell a vintage Steinway, if it's in good condition, to a dealer for in the neighborhood of $10K.
One might get more by advertising directly to buyers. However, this is a pain (it typically takes months to sell a piano). Moreover, any knowledgable buyer will hire a technician to inspect the instrument, and this could bring up all sorts of unpleasant surprises -- even if the instrument seems to be in good condition.
I live in a 2 bedroom condo in Oakland that cannot possibly fit the thing, nor do either of us play piano anymore. My thought was to repair it and then donate it to a local school auditorium and maybe write off the expenses but I haven’t looked into the details.
Now, I could easily afford a high-end piano, but could never dream of affording a house to put it in.
And no, I'm not some kind of nostalgic: whenever somebody gives me a paper book as a gift I try to find the ereader version because I prefer reading on an ebook.
You just can't sample your way out of the problem of getting the sound of many strings resonating when you press a key, especially when you hold the right pedal.
Electronic pianos are good, and I have one, but they are a different instrument that doesn't do what a cheap cabinet piano can.
I enjoy owning an electric piano simply because it lets me practise with headphones in a small apartment, but it does not substitute fully for a mechanical piano.
I have a Kawai CA97 and a grand piano, and I've occasionally asked guests to close their eyes and guess which one I'm playing, and people are usually not sure at all.
You may think I'm exaggerating the requirements, but I think you're underestimating the difficulty of solving what is at best a very hard physics problem in real time with imperceptible delay as a human carries out a sequence of physical manipulations that has taken them years or decades to learn. My $1,000 phone with the latest, greatest SoC can't open a PDF with a noticeable delay.
If your proposition is a middling approximation of an analog piano, you can already buy that at Costco for $500. Steinway and Bosendorfer don't seem particularly bothered about it.
Even an upright will sound much better than an electric. I've bought one of the best electric pianos you can buy (Yamaha N1 which has the same action as a grand piano) and it still didn't compare.
That's not to say the electric ones are bad but there is just much more nuance you can achieve on an acoustic.
I grew up in a small house (1100 sqft, 2bd, 1ba), and I think it actually made the L-shaped living room feel bigger, even though it used almost 1/5 of the area.
I have, and I couldn’t find any cheap ones (i.e. cheaper than a very good digital piano).
The ones that look cheap in the small ads are generally in poor condition. The vintage ones in good condition are expensive, and new ones are expensive.
A few years ago I was looking at a Schimmel grand for $30,000 (CAD). That's a big purchase, but I could afford it, especially for something I'd use daily for the rest of my life.
A modest house in Toronto is now over $1 million, and appreciates annually as much as my entire annual net income. I will never afford that.
I bet you could get a personal loan for a piano about as easily as you could get one for a car (from your bank, of course, not a car dealership).
I started taking lessons a year ago, and I play well enough now to fool most strangers into thinking I know how to play. :) My highest achievement is playing half of this piece now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d72mZVxdylA (it's not me in the video).
Just go ahead and learn to play.
"Antiques", as an industry, is a product of the 1960s. Before that, antiques were items over a century old, which was the US Customs definition. Anything less was just old. Selling stuff less than a century old as "antique" was a marketing move. Looks like that idea, from the era of the hula hoop, is over.
I think these antique malls spring up as much as anything from people who valuing these items collecting them. At some point you wake up and realize unless you're going to open a museum you don't actually need 10 examples of whatever.
But seriously I think the appeal of these things also reflects a completely different lifestyle. These days if you really think you'll have unexpected overnight guests you'll have a sleeper sofa instead of a Murphy Bed. My wife collects Singer Featherweight portable electric sewing machines. With the low cost of new and used clothes plus so few learning to sew I can't think of anything more absurdly useless. Although in her defense she's made use of it herself I don't think anyone under 40 would have any use for it unless they're trying to start a retro YouTube channel.
She never did sell it, but after she died, my father and his brothers imagined it would be worth as much as she had imagined it to be at auction. Long story short, it sold for about $100. 40 years of consternation for $100.
The lesson I learned from all of this is that stuff is just stuff, and the less of it you have when you die the better.
The first wave hits in 20-30 years, when kids grow into productive age, and sentimentally overvalue things from their childhood.
A grandma's rug or ex-libris, is your Lego set or another man's C64… What will today's kids feel sentimental about in 30 years? Better start collecting now.
Only the waves that speak to our craving for beauty and immortality are a safe bet at any time. Beautiful beginnings are where it's at!
Some years ago I visited the home of an upscale New England family. They had a million-dollar Alexander Calder sculpture on a corner table in the kitchen. At the time this struck me as an odd placement for such a valuable object — I guess this article explains why.
I'm reminded of a YouTube series which walks around malls on the brink of bankruptcy. Malls put forward a psuedo-utopian view of society, a place where people can come together (for commerce), but all of that matters 0% if there's less utility than Amazon.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLejUkwZ-XJX_BKt3prjes...
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNz4Un92pGNxQ9vNgmnCx...
Do you remember the name / link?
Personally I love bureaus. Before I could afford the space for a home desk and extra monitor, I used an Ikea bureau with my laptop, for years, and i loved it. I looked at local (UK) prices for antique ones, about 10 years ago, but they cost 4 times as much; if prices have really crashed under £100 now, I might get one for my kids. Ergonomy is always an issue though, one has to be careful with proportions.
I found the George III inlaid mahogany bureau referenced in the story on the Gorringes (Lewes, UK) website [0] and saved to archive.org/is [1][2].
The sale price was £70, and the pre-sale estimate was £100-150. The story referenced a sale price of £85 including fees, so I guess the fees must have been £15.
[0] Lot 794, A George III inlaid mahogany bureau W.97cm https://auction.gorringes.co.uk/auction-lot-detail/170918/79...
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20181104033127/https://auction.g...
Are you serious?! Cookie cutter strip malls in every American suburb are very close to dystopia to me. I'd think that people who enjoy coming together for shopping would prefer a walkable downtown area with shops that are not chains, but are owned by the people who run them.
That's the only kind of thing that can compete with e-commerce.
Many malls are being successfully revived now specifically because they have meaningfully invested in making them community spaces (stages with daily performances, play areas for kids, even larger and better food courts, chess/checker boards and playing areas, etc) which is something that Amazon can never compete against (unless they get into malls of course).
You see a similar thing with "old mainstreet USA" which for many years people lamented were disappearing because of big box stores and white flight (many many cities in the southeast) which now are vibrant and booming because they invested, again, in community and human experience by widening sidewalks, subsidising new theaters, restaurants and bars, adding cheap or free downtown parking - it all worked! Cities like Winston-Salem, NC (the one I'm most familiar with) that were wastelands in the early 2000's but are amazing places to hang out (and shop!) now.
Anyway, I disagree that it is all about utility. Malls competing head to head with Amazon just on shopping are doomed because what else in that equation are you even offering except utility and savings? But the idea that utility necessarily trumps (twitch) community doesn't jibe with my understanding of the facts.
That specific example is an especially good one. I worked downtown in '99 - '01, and the only reason we'd ever spend time downtown outside work hours were the occasional free concerts in the summer. Apart from offices, it felt like a ghost town. Now, when I get back there to visit friends/family, downtown is a real destination. People live there. There are galleries, concerts, good restaurants, breweries, a distillery, theaters... it feels like a really nice small city. At least in the general neighborhood of the Stevens Center.
Frankly that statement made me cringe. I have a few bureaus like the one in the article at home (my father has a passion for antiques) and the idea of using one of them for writing never crossed anybody's mind. They're obviously not ergonomic, but worse, they might get damaged (you'd rather not lean on the hinged writing surface of a 200 year old piece of furniture, it's not very solid). They're used to keep stuff, either open or closed. Your average papers, mantelpiece objects, assorted stuff, and of course phone and laptops in case of need, fit very well in the drawers and in the top compartment.
It came out of a 4000sqft home I grew up in built in 1989 for about 300k CAD. That house is worth about 4x now so despite being more financially successful than my parents, I don't come close to affording it.
I'm left with the heartbreaking reality that there's no room for the dining room set in my future.
Either I'm going to be renting for a very long time, or I'll leave this country again. It's kind of sad that Canadians are getting priced out of their own country!
I'd move there.
Ottawa is always going to be a government town first even though it has it's own tech scene, anything in the GTA gets swallowed by Toronto, Barrie and Brantford don't have universities, Windsor is too far from Toronto, but they might be able to piggyback on Detroit's revival if they play their cards right, London is stagnant and has been for decades, Kingston is on the wrong side of Toronto to really take advantage of Pearson, Guelph has already benefitted from Waterloo's explosion and the north is too harsh for many people.
I came to Waterloo for university about 15 years ago and never left. Despite real estate prices really jumping up, the investment in transit and transport through the region might mean south Kitchener and Cambridge are the next Waterloo.
You can't have one without the other!
For example, this is in a very central and convenient part of Kyoto: https://www.realestate.co.jp/forsale/view/538465
Or this one, for half the price: https://www.realestate.co.jp/forsale/view/438354
Other cities outside of Kyoto are even less expensive.
The problem is any job I’ve ever had is in Tokyo.
For software, there's probably not a lot of other options. For mechanical engineering there's a lot of interesting work all over the country.
Not much work there without fluent Japanese though, so I guess it turned out alright. I’ll just have to deal with houses costing a small fortune.
Unless you have different priorities, which is fine. Like I could afford some stuff, but "can't" cause that wouldn't let me afford other stuff my parents never had.
Maybe a 4x price increase is indeed excessive, but building a house like it was possible 50+ years ago, would be just illegal.
You are right if we go older. But we don't have to go far to prove the point.
The cost of improvements on land has decreased.
I could barely afford a house built as a hunting bungalow in 1918, expanded multiple times, in the 60s-70s a lot of unpermitted work was done. Trying to get work done was a nightmare because nothing was to code (some reputable contractors refused to do work). Sure, the appliances were fairly new, the pipes and some of the electrical had been updated, but all of those were relatively minor expenses and most of the upgrades were aesthetic.
Your insurance splits out the cost of the land and "improvements" (the structures) because you're only insuring the house because a flood/fire won't destroy the land. In my case, the cost of rebuilding the house dwarfed the cost of the property itself.
But the most job growth in the country requires that people move there (here) and they require houses when they arrive. With that surprising increase in demand, I expect I could get $250,000 for my house now, which is a staggering increase in a fairly short period of time.
On the other hand, if you're coming from a place where houses are selling for $1,200,000 (the 4 * $300,000 suggested above), then maybe you still see $250,000 as being affordable. We certainly have jobs. Every place of business in the area seems to be hiring.
Of course, Cambridge and many areas of Boston proper are quite expensive (as are some of the tonier suburbs like Concord).
Silicon Valley is a bit unusual in that you can't really escape from high prices, in spite of being suburban sprawl, because of the geographical constraints.
The article also notes furniture like rolltop desks. My dad has a beautiful one that mostly serves as a display cabinet in his living room. I'm honestly not sure what I would do with it. I have my own shelving to display things and it would be pretty useless for any actual work I do. (As I kid I really loved sitting at that desk and doing kid-like scribbling at it.)
A big table is at least fairly multipurpose if you have the space. A lot of other furniture is a lot less so.
They’re a pretty nice leather love seat and couch we purchased new about 8 years ago. The leather has been a god send for spills and no stains, etc.
Unfortunately our roomba ALWAYS gets stuck on them. If we get one full run a week it’s a minor miracle. So on this very day I finally hit the garage, pulled out the welder and grinder and am giving my couch and loveseat a 1” lift.
Lots of other factors of course. I imagine since R/E market is hyper local, country-wide stats won’t really give an accurate picture postal code to postal code.
Homes in the Bay Area are pretty big. Those narrow row houses in San Francisco are not really the norm in the rest of the area.
This report[1] suggests less that 2,000 sq-ft on average for most of the Bay Area sold in the past 12 months. Based on median lot size for detached home sales (0.25 acre in Diablo Valley being the largest by a huge margin; 2,500 sq-ft lots in SF), most are certainly multi-story units.
In summary: less than 2,000 sq-ft, appreciably less than 0.25 acre lot, multi-story.
[1] https://www.bayareamarketreports.com/trend/bay-area-market-s...
Even if they had the space, it likely wouldn’t match any of the usable furniture, and that furniture is necessary. Cars don’t need to match...
I think part of its scale too. We’ve been making desks for a long time, and they’re pretty durable. Cars are newer, and frankly most of them got cubed anyways. There’s not a lot of desirable cars around, fewer each day as they break and crash, which is why the prices rise.
Unless you’re talking about the cheapest of value furniture from Ikea, or your desk is from some other company, I really can’t fathom it not surviving something as simple as moving it.
https://www.amazon.com/Vantage-Corner-Desk-in-Maple/dp/B00GI...
The problem is not just that it's made of particle board that is held together with a small number of fasteners and nothing else, but it's also a very awkward shape. It's very hard to move without putting a lot of stress on joints that were not designed to take it.
For a solid year my wife and I went to estate sales or pre-retirement-home-move garage sales every weekend and bought 20+ paintings depicting local Florida nature to line up our hallways. We barely spent $2000 on paintings and furniture combined to furnish living room, family room, dining room, hallways, bathrooms, and 5 bedrooms (ignoring beds). Our guests often remark how gorgeous our house looks because of the antiques.
We got lucky that the house we bought goes well with antiques. Otherwise we would have easily spent $10k+ on comparable furnishing.
She has several theories about the shift, one of them is that the things my generation and younger are sentimental or nostalgic about are just different than prior generations: Big dinners with family in a formal dining room (with all the accoutrement that entails, like a buffet table, nice China, silverware, crystal glasses, etc.) were common up until the 80s, even among the middle class, but houses for the middle class don't even have dining rooms anymore and haven't since about the late 80s. Or, having a desk where mom and dad did taxes, wrote letters and cards, etc., maybe it'd be passed down, or maybe when you grew into adulthood, you'd get a desk for your own correspondence and the general business of running a household. Sewing machines used to be a thing passed from mother to daughter...nobody sews, anymore. My younger friends don't have memories of their moms sewing costumes for them at Halloween (in general), whereas I do, and it's a pretty cherished memory (and I own a sewing machine, and have owned big oak desks like the one my dad had in his office). Houses have large closets now, no need for an armoire. Kitchens have walk-in pantries or deep cabinets with racks on drawer runners, making pantry cabinets obsolete and a waste of space.
And, of course, stuff like fine China has always been aspirational for a specific kind of buyer...and it requires a lot of space for display, which without a dining room, most people don't have. And, mass-produced goods can be "fancy" in ways that cost a lot of money in previous centuries. It no longer means anything to have a plate with fancy designs on it, because manufacturers can churn out a few million of them every year and profitably sell them for a few bucks. In some regards antiques were a manufactured aspirational industry, like diamonds or luxury cars or bags or whatever. In other regards, though, they're a recognition that things used to be better made than they have been in our lifetimes. Furniture up until the mid-1800s was entirely hand-made, and it didn't start being made to be disposable until the mid-1900s. Even long after furniture making was at least partially automated, it was still made of real hard woods that would last centuries. New furniture is effectively garbage waiting to happen; you buy it today and in ten years it's on the side of the road with the rest of the trash.
Several factors have converged to make antiques a shrinking market. It also means antique furniture is a real bargain, especially compared to the garbage that even expensive furniture brands are shoveling out these days.
I work full time remote from my laptop and somehow I'm always just sitting on the kitchen island. Or within View of it.
Our house is filled with beautiful French furniture, not because it will increase in value - simply that it every piece has wonderful character, lasts forever and tells a story.
The reasons for buying new furniture are even fewer now that the market for antiques has tanked. My mom still has a couple of booths in antique malls and she makes money at it, but nothing like she used to, and she's mostly pivoted from a focus on furniture to glassware and smaller collectibles. The shift is partly because she's older and can't handled bigger items, anymore, especially without my dad to help, but also because the market for antique furniture isn't what it used to be. People are a lot more likely to have space for a nice piece of glassware than for an armoire or buffet table.
You can buy great old or antique furniture for less than new, and it'll be better made, it'll age better, and it'll hold its value better (it probably won't really go up in value, like antiques once did, but it likely won't drop too much either, whereas new particle board furniture is absolutely going in the trash or by the road in ten years).
If you want to get a bargain and can invest time, my mom buys at garage sales, flea markets, thrift stores, and auctions, in that order (with garage sales being, by far, the best place to get good prices, but also the most time-intensive). Estate sales (a sale after someone has died and their entire house is being emptied out for sale) in old neighborhoods are the best option for finding antiques and old furniture. But, these days, even estate sales may have no good furniture. The first generation to start buying mass-produced trash furniture is now beginning to be among the folks dying and leaving an estate to be dealt with by their family.
There are also often antique expos in most major cities, where lots of dealers come from surrounding cities to sell; happens a couple times a year, generally. Again, this will be retail prices and maybe even higher, but you have a lot to choose from. If you're looking for stuff that doesn't sell well, you can drop in at the end of the last day and make offers on stuff you like...they don't want to load it up and carry it back home, so they'll let it go for a song. As recently as a decade ago, I was able to buy some really nice Mid-Century Modern stuff at a good price this way (good enough that I made a modest profit when I moved a couple years later and sold those pieces on craisglist).
But, I usually buy on Craigslist. It allows me to setup searches for specific items I want, and I can make offers when things come up that I like, even if the price isn't quite right. People on craisglist may or may not know the right price for something, and often just want it gone. For mass-produced stuff, you can often figure out what the right price is by searching on eBay for recent "Sold" listings. This is not as cheap as garage sale prices can be, and if there is a bargain you have to jump on it immediately, but you don't have to invest a lot of time or wake up at the butt crack of dawn to find good stuff at fair prices.
Unfortunately, craigslist is in decline, so you also may want to check Facebook marketplace (which is a usability trash fire, and I hate it, but lots of people use it). It's nowhere near as usable, in terms of saving searches and getting notifications about stuff you might want, and it doesn't really have good filters like craigslist.
Speaking of getting deals, when you're in the market for stuff like this, carry a nice chunk of cash with you everywhere. Paying cash can get you discounts with a lot of the folks who sell antiques. They aren't often technically savvy, and their credit card fees are often very high (like 3-5%, and the venue they sell in may even add some extras on top for card transactions). And, while most professionals in the business are keeping good records and paying taxes on everything (and malls definitely are), a lot of people for whom antiques and collectibles is a side hustle, as you find at flea markets and expo events, will be happy to have some money that's not on the books.
I enjoy mid-century modern furniture, for example, though because it has become trendy in the past decade, it's no longer as much of a bargain as it used to be (this is another trend my mom has noticed...the era of stuff people are still buying has shifted forward in time, I guess to whatever people's parents and grandparents had in their houses when they were growing up, so it's what has nostalgic value for them, 30-somethings furnishing their houses probably spent their early formative years in mid-century modern furnished houses). But, I also really enjoy the era before that...1900s through the 1940s was an excellent era in American furniture, if you don't want to spend a lot of money. It was beginning to be machine-manufactured, so there's a lot of it out there, and it was made from our vast hardwood forests that had yet to be depleted. And, I tend to prefer simple, utilitarian, American styles over more ornate older European inspired styles, which used to be a good thing when hunting for bargains, but now it's among the stronger periods and styles (while others, like French antiques, have tanked in value a lot, newer American eras and styles have held pretty firm...partly that's also because American styles and newer eras just didn't have far to fall, as they were cheap to start with).
"Bombproof" seems like it would imply heaviness or blockiness, which isn't among the characteristics of the pieces I like. There's actually a certain delicacy and balance that is the defining characteristic of the pieces I like (though there are some clunky pieces, as well). I like the feeling that the piece has exactly the right number of pieces made of exactly the right amount of wood and at a human scale (i.e. not large, the way a lot of "expensive" furniture is). I also like the wood choices...oak is super common for these styles from these eras, and when it's 100 years old it weighs almost nothing while still being incredibly strong. It's a perfect balance of things I like in furniture.
In my experience, particleboard furniture can be of pretty good quality - often better than low-end solid wood furniture, as particleboard is free of warping and knots.
Particle board furniture also weighs more than furniture made of real hardwoods, often a lot more. Making it harder to take with you when you move, and harder to sell used. Particle board doesn't handle being taken apart and put back together (e.g. taking legs off of something to get it through a door) as well as real wood does.
There are several good reasons furniture is made of particle board today (primarily that humanity chewed through the world's old growth hardwoods over the past couple of centuries, and it'll take more than a few of our lifetimes for them to return if humanity survives long enough to figure out how to be responsible stewards of forests), but there aren't any reasons for consumers to prefer particle board over hardwood furniture from the past, especially when real hardwood furniture from the past is cheaper than new particle board furniture.
Let's just say that I've seen a lot of furniture in my life and I have never seen an old (i.e. mid-century, when it began to be a thing manufacturers toyed with) piece of predominantly particle board furniture that I'd want in my house, have you? I have, on the other hand, seen and owned pieces of hardwood furniture that were still beautiful and functional at well over a hundred years old (you can find older than that, too, but, at least in the US, you'll find that even in this poor antiques market they're likely more expensive than similar new furniture).
I personally won't own particle board furniture. I won't buy it from Ikea (technological and logistical marvel it may be, good furniture it is not), or from Ethan Allen, or anyone else, no matter how beautiful it looks on the showroom floor. Because, I know that in a few years, it will look much worse than a good piece of hardwood furniture. And, I'll probably have needed to move it at least once, and it really is often stupidly heavy.
And yeah, nobody used em. A friend of mine growing up had both living and family room in his house. One was used all the time. The other was untouched, pristine. Like they might have even had plastic covering the furniture. We weren't supposed to play there; it was only for formal entertaining.
My in laws also have a separate living room with a piano in it. And besides the off chance someone tried playing chopsticks, the room is unused. Infact, most of us put our coats there. The family room has a TV in it, so everyone goes in there.
Heck, the house I grew up in had both a kitchen and dining room. I think the dining room only got used on holidays when we had guests over.
Not sure why you haven't seen as much. Might have to do with the size of the house, demographics, or region.
But boy, are they stupid. Rooms everyone thinks they need, but nobody uses.
There was a time when antiques went for crazy money and you did envy people who had got phenomenally rich during the craze that predated that huge crash. Antique dealers had their 'stock' at home and they lived a charmed existence going off to auction houses, getting better rates at the bank, fiddling taxes, learning about history, living in houses full of things you could not touch, driving big Volvo estate cars and not having to work 9 to 5.
It all went wrong because it was a speculative bubble and the wheeler-dealer antique dealers ended up the bag holders, with all of the debt and nobody wanting to buy from them. On the surface it appeared as if it had been a classic market of arbitrage, this was before the Internet and before TV shows (Antiques Road Show, Lovejoy) that popularised what the antique dealers had been doing.
But then when it crashed it became a bit more obvious what had really been going on, the antique dealers had been buying and selling amongst themselves, the price going up each time with no genuine customers buying this stuff. So the grand house of the antique dealer with all of that priceless stuff you dared not to touch really was useless cruft.
The letter writing bureau scoffed at in the article had some utility, during peak antiques hype such a bureau wouldn't have someone writing letters at it, it might have the land-line phone on it and keep private papers inside, but it wouldn't be strictly useless, it would be valuable 'stock'. There were antiques that were vastly more useless than a writing bureau, with no utility whatsoever.
Pricing was also special information, only a reputable antiques dealer could tell you the true price of something unless it went up to London to go to auction. Local auctions in places like Tetbury (Gloucestershire, famous for antiques) were only attended by people in the trade, if you did go there as a layperson then you just wouldn't understand it, plus laypeople had proper day jobs that precluded such shenanigans.
The tax scam aspect was because the antiques really were unlicensed securities, you could have an antiques dealer buy that letter writing bureau and fiddle the VAT on the purchase in a multitude of ways. Plus interest rates were significant then so you only got rates beyond what normal people had access to if you borrowed a whole lot of money on a business rather than person basis. This was where the regular money was being made, this masked the bag-holding eventuality of the trade back then.
The TV shows came along to glamorise the game and the TV shows came along to give everything a price. Obviously there was eBay, changing demographics, changing travel patterns, the death of the High Street, straightforward fashion, IKEA, AirBnB and everything else. This may have wiped out the scraps that were left after the big crash of the early 1990's, but really the original game and the lifestyle that went with it was something quite gravity defying, driven by greed. Everyone so busy being greedy that the antique dealers didn't realise until too late that they were only trading amongst themselves and that they were to be the ultimate bag holders.
"By 1998, Yahoo was the beneficiary of a de facto Ponzi scheme. Investors were excited about the Internet. One reason they were excited was Yahoo's revenue growth. So they invested in new Internet startups. The startups then used the money to buy ads on Yahoo to get traffic. Which caused yet more revenue growth for Yahoo, and further convinced investors the Internet was worth investing in. When I realized this one day, sitting in my cubicle, I jumped up like Archimedes in his bathtub, except instead of "Eureka!" I was shouting "Sell!""
How would this work from a cash flow perspective? If no external customers buy anything, then every sale reduces the wealth of the group. That doesn't sound like it could last very long at all. You'd need all antique dealers to be independently wealthy.
I do think there's a lot to be said for repurposing what you can. I think of all the old, big, heavy stereo and television cabinets and what they could be turned into today. Even if modern equivalents, etc. Most often I've seen older china cabinets used as modern display or liquor cabinets.
Any tutorial for looking for this type of items selling in store or online?
Is Ebay trustable for these?