Reproduction Furniture in America

Reproduction furniture. Few phrases could sound more dull, less exciting, or more unglamorous. Tell someone “I’ve got some old reproduction furniture” and the listener immediately pictures nondescript mass-produced copies of beautiful, deeply patinated antiques. The implied connotation is that a piece of reproduction furniture is something you have when you can’t afford the real thing - or worse yet, when you can’t distinguish the real thing from the reproduction. Add to those negatives the casual statement I, as an appraiser, so often hear, “Don’t waste your time looking at that old piece. It’s just an old reproduction,” and the unspoken implication is that older reproduction furniture isn’t worth a second glance, and it certainly has no real monetary value. In short, it is no more, than “used goods.” This is unfortunate, because many honest, well-constructed, and artfully crafted “old reproductions” pieces of Furniture are of finer quality and worth more money than the glut of overpriced, fake, made-up, altered, or generally inferior pieces- that are being sold as “antiques” these days. Many old reproductions are literally too good to toss out. The problem is that few people know much about their grandparents’ or great-grandparents’ store-bought furniture. Most have only heard a few sentimental family stories about Papa’s sofa or Aunt Mary’s dining table. If you really want to be able to tell how old and how fine a piece of furniture is, you need to know the history of how these pieces came to be. Over the past hundred years, the approximate time during which reproduction furniture has been made, countless books and articles have been written about antique furniture. Most of these concentrate on the different styles and their history. Many others, painstakingly instruct the would-be antiques collector on how to distinguish true 18 th. or early 19 th century antiques furniture, from later made reproductions that imitate the early pieces. American reproduction furniture made before the 1950’s, copies of the Jacobean, Queen Anne, Chippendale, Hepplewhite, Sheraton, and even Empire and Victorian pieces, plus French, Spanish and Italian pieces, make up a major portion of the furniture found in American homes in the 1990’s.

Extracted from Los Angeles Furniture Magazine