The fate of antiques and heirlooms in a disposable age
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Personally I don't own more antiques because they are usually shockingly expensive. The story I like to tell is that not long ago I went to get an antique repaired at a restorer. His workshop doubled as a warehouse; he used to be an antiques dealer but now does rentals for TV/film production alongside his restoration business.
The warehouse was filled to the brim with beautiful antique furniture that was literally caked in dust. He lamented to me that young people like me don't want to buy antiques any more. I told him I loved antiques, and that (pointing) that wooden chair over there is beautiful. Maybe I'll take it home. How much is it? "That one? That's $4,000."
No wonder our generation doesn't buy antiques--you'd have to be a millionaire to furnish a home!
I grew up in a house with expensive furniture, and it wasn't the most awesome experience. There were a lot of strict rules to follow. As much as I like having nice things, I don't want my own children to grow up in an environment where they're not allowed to have free access to art supplies, for fear that, in the course of normal play, they unwittingly commit a couple thousand dollars' worth of property damage.
If one is of the perspective that antiques must be carefully preserved at all costs, then owning them might be stressful, especially with young children around.
Personally I think that antiques (and antique furniture in particular) are meant to be lived with. Damage is part of their history, and can almost always be repaired and restored. Sometimes the repair won't be perfect, but that's part of the history for the next owner too. I kind of like that.
I grew up with antiques my parents inherited. They were resilient to rough and tumble play. The antiques would hurt you more than you'd hurt it. But with arts stuff, there were strict rules because spilled paint or glue with damage it in a permanent sort of way.
I actually think the very concept of antique is complicit in the problem here. Once upon a time, furniture was furniture, and, while nice old heirloom furniture was still nice old heirloom furniture, we didn't have things like Antiques Roadshow to tell us, "Gee, it's too bad you used that as an actual piece of furniture, because it could have been worth $20,000, but now this and that and the other thing all mean it's worth only about $3,000."
The nice thing about that hobby is nobody else collects them, so I can often pick one up for a dollar.
Selling to millionaires is a sound market segmentation strategy because millionaires are more likely to have money for antiques than thousandaires. And even better is the B2B model of the restorer because TV and film productions have realistic budgets and bring repeat business of the type that has a vested interest in the sustainability of the restorer’s business.
Or to put it another way, the restorer’s business caters to people who see future value in a warehouse full of dusty antiques.
Stuff that is expensive to buy is also often expensive to transport. "Antiques" and the like may make sense in world in which people move very rarely and tend to occupy the same apartment for decades. They don't make any sense for people who live mobile lives and move frequently. As others have said, you want to own your stuff, not have your stuff own you.
I have better uses for 4k than a chair that's probably way heavy and clunky
Let them enjoy their "$4k" in illiquid storage. It will go for $50 in a liquidation auction most likely
My parents have decided to unload most of their furniture rather than wait for us kids to inherit it. They don't want to burden us with being attached to a bulky item that doesn't match our lifestyle or tastes. I think I'll do the same for my kids.
I've got a family member who, being somewhat aware of this phenomenon, has decided to hold on to everything that they think might become valuable in the future. I suspect that, over the years, the cost of warehousing all this stuff has easily outstripped any potential profits. Let alone any actual profits.
I think it was The Expanse book series that mentioned wood furniture is a rare commodity. Depending what path we take with the planet, jobs, and commodities, the same could be true in our future.
I'm outfitting my home with hardwood furniture. I think it's more durable, nicer, and with the right styles and finishes - aesthetic.
I'm definitely not collecting things like a hoarder to "pass down". I have a family member that is a hoarder, and it's completely irrational, and the hoarding is so bad, that the items are treated poorly and lose value. Unfortunately the tens of thousands of dollars this person is spending "for us oneday" will be absolutely worthless.
I suspect that grandma was collecting all this stuff to give to her heirs. But those heirs were selling it all for pennies.
It was all kind of sad.
People eventually pass, it is a fact.
The vast majority of things eventually depreciate, regardless of initial value.
It took a while, but I've really tried to focus on retaining what has value to me (not just in general).
We kept a lot of things from relatives early on because they owned them.
We've pivoted more to:
1) Things we know for a fact need to be kept (historical records, important documents for closing estates, etc)
2) Things that continue to have value in the present, they are either functional (hey, I have a ladder now!) or sentimental and worth the operational cost (hey, I have a curio!).
I type this in a room with a handful of things, it is a mix of new (computer desk chair) and functional family items (stereo, storage cabinet).
If I can find a use for a family item, that's great, but I'm not going to invent one unless it fits in the above 2 points.
That was long, but I'd say the estate sales aren't necessarily sad. You don't know what was kept and why.
Depends on how often you have to move, and whether your stuff is easy to move or hard to move, and whether you're prevented from living where you really want to live by the things you own.
For most people, it appears that human relationships really matter and stuff exists to enable those relationships. If you are too busy caretaking your stuff, or choosing apartments based on what your stuff will fit into, you are degrading your relationships to care for your stuff.
They don't have to be big, horribly heavy, and ornate. They can be simple, durable, and provide utility for years when particleboard would have disintegrated.
Google Photos allows unlimited storage. As long as you elect to store the photos/videos at a slightly lesser quality. Which they still look great when browsing them.
Because of this, I've been able to index over 43,000 photos/videos of our family from the past 10 years. I tracked down every old laptop, phone, and external drive I could find, and grabbed the photos off of them to have them in one consolidated place.
With Facebook, you can even export your photos from FB to Google Photos directly. Here's the link:
Births, our wedding, soccer games, Christmas's, it's all there.
I'm hoping that the service lasts longer than my lifetime. :) And that I can pass down the URL to my kids.
P.S. The search for Google Photos is amazing - it recognizes faces, locations, events (e.g. concerts, weddings, etc), and even objects (e.g. red dress). It's everything that iOS Photos should be.
Until it doesn't. Or rather when Google no longer benefits from photos as a training corpus it will no longer have a business rationale for keeping old photos.
While 43,000 photos sounds like a lot and would have substantial heft as physical prints even at 4x6. As digital files they will fit on a $60 external spinning disk with room to spare. Even as RAW files.
But to me, a single print of a child's soccer game is going to have more impact than a thousand digital snapshots. Please, for the sake of the people you want to see your pictures, make some prints and put them in frames and hang them on a wall. They will last. Because physics hasn't changed. Good luck.
But the amazingness of Google's Photo service is the search.
My wife and I reminisce and say something like "remember that time we went to a Yankees/Red Sox baseball game - so much fun". I search for "Yankees baseball", and boom, there's the photo of my wife, at the stadium, from 2012.
I can't replicate that functionality.
Also, I ruthlessly prune my photo collection, because once I clear out all the cruft that I don't care about (photos that are blurry, near duplicate, no longer relevant, etc), I have half as many photos to look through. I only keep 500-1000 photos per year, one folder per year, as well as a synced Camera Roll folder with not-yet-processed photos.
Not only does this make browsing through my photo collection a much more enjoyable experience, it doesn't take up much space. I have my entire photo collection (11000 photos from the last 12 years) stored locally on my phone in full resolution, as well as backed up in various other locations.
I've done the same as you, importing every family digital photo I can find into iCloud Photos. Flip Phones, Palm, BlackBerry, early digital cameras. $10 data cables from eBay are the way to go.
I've yet to tackle the film photos and slides, but that's next on the list.
The descriptions exported as "Copy of... #{description}" which is really lame. And cumbersome to clean up.
And then there were a whole host of videos and photos that did not import with the original date/time stamp.
I run a docker image on one of my local servers that does a sync of anything new in Google Photos each time it is run. Gives me added peace of mind.
While you still have your originals from all those laptops and phones and drives, copy your originals onto storage that you own. If you have a mess of duplicates like I did, you're free to use PhotoStructure to dedup and sweep everything into one neat pile on one big drive. It's free during the beta in exchange for your feedback. https://photostructure.com/about/introducing-photostructure/
Eventually an unbounded archive grows so large & onerous you'll never really want to look through it again.
(This was one good feature of prints & albums. A minimum level of curation was required)
For example, about 10 years ago, my mother gave me a stack of truly awful decorative plates with cats painted on them, and I stored them as an "investment" because eBay had them for $60/ea. I checked last year and now they were selling for $4/ea, so I just put them out front in a free box for someone with different taste to enjoy. I don't even know why I had stored them all of those years, like I was going to get into the business of selling decorative plates if they appreciated in value or something.
The glues weren't so bad. The older the piece, the more likely they are to have safe glues. [1]
Now for lead: You really don't want to eat or inhale lead. This might mean that you can't eat off of old dishes, for example (Friend of the family had an incident years ago). Or that you need to get something that was painted before 1978 tested for lead paint - and then, if you have it, you might have to treat the piece to seal the lead paint in. You might not want to lick the furniture or let kids do so. Not all paint was lead paint, and not everything got painted.
New furniture often leeches things from the plastics and foams and glues used in manufacturing. (So do new cars - it gives the 'new car' smell). Which aren't all that healthy either. This is despite safety regulations. I honestly don't know how it compares to antique stuff, though: We just know it is likely to have less known bad stuff and zero chances of lead.
[1]https://www.discoverypub.com/columns/michelleknows/1017_Mich...
Heirlooms are more about personal sentimental value than anything mass market. Nana's old worn out chair could be contended for in inheritance even though you would have to pay to get rid of it instead of selling it.
Not necessarily. There may never have been enough. That said, even if none were lost and there were enough available to meet demand when they were made, population increases mean that the number available per capita is going down increasing effective scarcity.
I've been through a few iterations of "clean out Grandma's house" by now and the grandkids, by and large, have the attitude of "Do I have an immediate use for X? No - throw it in the appraise/donate pile"
Blame Marie Kondo if you like.
> “It seems illogical to buy mass-produced modern furniture when the 200-year-old skilfully(sp) hand carved antique pieces now compare so well in price,”
Not if you care about comfort more than appearance.
I guess you could use it every day and enjoy the quality, but even then you don't want your kids bashing on it.
The subsequent generations may show some interest. And in their time it will either be scarce and perhaps of some value, or still abundant and cheap from the previous generations' lack of interest.
I believe the older generation wants us to have their fancy heirlooms - 12 piece dining room sets, silverware, china, their most giant gaudy antique armoire.
Converelsy, what I have tried to instill in my parents as they downsize their belongings is that I want the practical stuff they used every day. A quality set of dishes (not china!) - my mom's chemex. What's left of their old solid-wood furniture. That stuff has value to me - it was made differently - better quality, thicker, etc. Items that were part of pomp and circumstance used once or twice a year back then don't interest me.
Amen! The most useful thing my parents handed down to me was the dishes we used for my entire childhood. They're just pretty basic stoneware dishes made in the ol' US of A but they held up for 30 years, starting from before I was born up until I got my own place after college. Then I used them for the another 10 years, and apart from some chips on some of them, or not having a complete set due to the few that broke, they look like they could be only a few years old.
It was kind of neat watching my son eat off the same plates that I ate off when I was his age.
We eventually got some new plates but have the old ones packed away. I'm curious to see how long the new ones last, I don't know if they make them like they used to.
But I note you said "borderline indestructible". Not just "indestructible".
Which means I have found a fellow victim of ceramic shard explosion! They take a beating, but when they go, they go big!
The tea cups for me are hit or miss if they will survive. I think it has to do with the shape. Everything else is very tough.
... you brought me to tears with laughter! :-)
Thank you, I needed that.
It's remarkable. Despite being probably around 40 years old the surface finish of the plates (which took many a steak knife) still looks brand new.
Many china patterns may be used every day (not all: some are not dishwasher safe), and almost all silverware is usable every day (there are a few tricks, like not leaving it in contact with water and iron). Seriously, give it a shot!
Toys in the original unopened box may be worth more but that isn't why there was demand for them in the first place. Unless there is some sort of hilarious misprint, defect, or very questionable concept (accidentally looking very sexual, looking like a reference to some notorious event) thaf makes it a curiosity in itself, the toys were valued because of their use.
That's the only road back I can see for silverware & china. Get people to actually use it.
It really can be nice stuff- it's just pointless if it lives in a big case.
(If it only lasts a year or three, there's plenty more where that came from)
We cannot seem to get it through our parent's heads that we don't want any valuable antiques that will need to be taken care of and the fact that it belonged to great-great-aunt Thelma who none of us have ever met or heard of except in connection to this roll top desk does not give the desk in question sentimental value.
Hopefully it goes to someone who will actually appreciate it and enjoy it, but that someone is neither of us.
https://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/images/upload_librar...
I've always loved the idea of being nimble, but I equally love the idea of having a family estate.
Hopefully my future children will be diversified with both options.
It's less valuable to people because it is so easily available.
We also have the same furniture that we bought 20 years ago as we could afford it. It is all scratched, dented, frayed and worn. It has contributed itself to a lot of living, which is what we think possessions should do. We want to own our things, not the other way around.
My parents bought reasonable sturdy hardwood furniture (In the early 70s I think) and apart from a few replacements it's still in use, having survived moving twice. I'm glad I was never told to not just "live" there, using it.
My own flat is very different, we bought most of the furniture while I was still a student and my wife was starting her first job, so of course there's a lot of IKEA and other not so expensive stuff, but to be honest... even after 10 years now I don't feel the need to replace a lot, my desk doesn't look too good but everything else looks pretty ok or even brand new, so maybe disposable stuff is sturdy enough for a good chunk of people? We haven't moved and I heard IKEA stuff often won't survive a 2nd move, so that might be another thing.
It depends. Surely some styles are not wonderful, but others are quite beautiful. Some styles are very of their time (and look horrible later), while others are timeless.
I like the timeless stuff. Lenox Federal china will never, ever look bad. Chantilly, Fairfax or Strasbourg silverware will always have a place at a table. A good Baccarat or Waterford crystal will always sparkle. Sure, one could go for 2020-trendy, but in 2025 or 2030 it will look old & crusty — but the classic never grow stale.
Unless you are lucky enough to have an uncle who left an Apple Lisa in its original box on a shelf in his garage...