My favourite chest of drawers is the simple “Country Sheraton” bow-front in plain mahogany standing about 3 feet 6 inches in height. There are plenty of these about, well worth the L15 to L20 asked for them in the bigger antique stores. But the smaller ones are getting hard to find and will cost you a great deal more.

But going back for a moment into the world of oak I am always taken by the extraordinary variety of carved cupboards one finds in substantial farmhouses, or perhaps having strayed thence to A corner cupboard, ear y some private house which, by its general character, calls out for old oak. At the moment there are bargains to be picked up in oak, for many dealers openly profess they know nothing about it. Indeed, as most of their clients seem to be dedicated to the eighteenth- century woods like walnut and mahogany, why should they? Some of this carved work is genuinely old, the pieces often showing by their styles an obviously foreign origin. Other pieces were made during the mid- and late- Victorian revival of the taste for “Gothic” fashions.

Antique Collector MagazineBut here and there you will find pieces which have great character and are still houseable in modern spaces— do not forget that the older they are the less likely they are to have been made for Victorian mansions; and the more likely they were to have been commissioned from local craftsmen for people of the eighteenth century and earlier, whose rooms were smaller if anything than ours. Many of them again are genuinely old pieces which were elaborately carved in Victorian days. Many of them, too, have been quite unashamedly made up from different pieces of furniture by honest village craftsmen, using the canopy of a four-poster bed to top off a richly carved sideboard of the “hutch” type. This is why you will sometimes find puzzling differences in the styles of carving on a piece. And why not, considering that seasoned and carved timber was valuable property in days when a rich playwright like Shakespeare did not see anything odd in leaving his wife his “second- best bed”.

Of smaller cupboards there are many sorts, some for use by the bedside, others as medicine chests and the like. There are also the various kinds of corner cupboard, from the large free-standing affair of later days back to the small neat, hanging cupboards used in Georgian roams.

These cupboards were as a rule not intended for the grand houses, which had plenty of room for their great cabinets and sideboards. They were rather for the smaller middle- class houses such as one sees in terraces in the alder towns or in villages. The rooms in these houses were—as one has remarked elsewhere—about the same size as in modern houses, and there was just about the same need to conserve space. So these Georgian and later corner cupboards are particularly interesting to anyone furnishing today.

The early corner cupboards were not intended for display at all, but for putting away things which might be needed— for example tea things, decanters and glasses, boxes of cakes and gingerbread, spice dredgers and the like. It was only later that they enlarged themselves and acquired glass fronts, for by this time we were much too stately to keep these things in the parlour and liked to ring for the maid to bring them in from the far-away kitchen. Now we used them for displaying china and glass, and so helping to fill the entire room with our proud possessions.

Some of the cases have had their glass fronts added later, as one can generally see by close examination, but provided this work is genuine and sound there is no reason to reject a cupboard out of hand : it may have been done quite a long time ago. Furthermore, do not despise cupboards with fine mahogany doors, but with backs of deal: this was common practice in the eighteenth century when mahogany was an expensive wood. There are also some fine Georgian corner cupboards in oak.

Finally a word about chests, which, as we have seen, are about the oldest piece of furniture ever made. There is still nothing like them for storing blankets or linen, or even, Carved oak cupboard or press, if you have a family, for useas a hold-all in a hall which would otherwise be littered with children’s toys and books. But unless there is a drawer at the foot, or perhaps covered shelves inside at the ends, they are not so useful for smaller things—which of course, was why our ancestors evolved the chest of drawers.

All the same I wonder at the number of fine oak chests, beautifully made and sometimes finely carved, which are to be found in our salerooms and shops, which would do credit to the hall of any country-style house. In the one above it, of course, you have the very representative of the change from the chest into the chest of drawers, with carved panels and brass- handled drawers.

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Ancient Cupboards and Chests continue…