No question we are bold selling our handmade furniture at auction— intricate, impeccably built, and often very personal pieces. Yet for 11 years the New Hampshire Furniture Masters, a peer association of skilled craftsmen mostly from New Hampshire, a Vermonter, and two from Massachusetts, have been doing just that with ever growing recognition and success. October 22, 2006, we filled the grand ballroom of the equally grand Wentworth-by-the Sea Hotel near Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and auctioned 23 pieces. The average price for the masters’ works was over $7,000.

The pieces ranged from a classic pier table in crotch mahogany (unsold), to reinterpretations of traditional forms, my country huntboard featured in Fine Woodworking #187 ($11,550), a modern ebony and holly cabinet on stand with gently curved diamond patterned surfaces ($11,000), to a sculptural and fun centipede table with 13 maple sapling legs that sold for the high price of the night ($12,100).

Nineteen masters participated, one invited artist, and four prisoners from the New Hampshire State Prison, whom we have been mentoring over the past six years. The auction — and quite a party it is — begins with a silent auction of fun smaller works by the masters that generates funds for our prison, apprenticeship, and educational programs.

 

The author answers questions about his huntboard at the 2006 New Hampshire Furniture Masters auction.

To protect the maker, some but not all the pieces have a reserve price, a selling minimum. Some also have the support by a patron who underwrites a piece and gets it unless they are outbid auction night, which often happens.

To build interest in the auction furniture, we had three public exhibitions during the summer months, supporters hosted intimate parties with a small group of masters, and we published a full-color catalog that describes who we are and each piece in detail. Ultimately what sells our work is first, doing the very best we are capable of — and having 20 other sets of masters’ eyes looking over your work encourages that — and second, educating our buyers. We lecture, do demonstrations, make sample exploded joints, whatever we can to illustrate building furniture of this caliber.

The author sits in suspense as his huntboard goes up for auction. It sold for $11,550.

An auction can be a brutally honest and at times a humbling marketplace. Buyers reward the pieces they want with excited bidding, while others never make it to the reserve. As a maker these are valuable lessons about appealing designs or furniture forms and realistic prices. Our savvy buyers see a bargain, and think of our furniture as future Sotheby’s works on their maiden voyage.

Garrett Hack is a Fine Woodworking contributing editor and furniture maker in Thetford, Vermont.

Photos: Steve Booth

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