Replies

1. 
   rjlii | Mar 29, 2025 01:26pm | #1

   Paywall

2. 
   joeleonetti | Mar 29, 2025 04:45pm | #2

   To get good furniture, I just make my own. I would never pass it off as antique though. I grew in a house that had Ethan Allen furniture and I thought of that as very nice furniture. It is nice, however, I can easily make better. In fact, I think most folks can make better than they can buy without too many hours at the bench. If I had to guess, 250 hours at a bench.

3. 
   derekcohen | Mar 30, 2025 02:08am | #3

   I imagine that there are an awful lot of copies around. Some are possibly better than the originals! However most of these are acknowledged to be reproductions, and few would attempt to pass them off as originals unless they were deviously-minded. Most of us here build furniture which, even when we believe they were original designs - and may advertise them as such - stand on the shoulders of others. Much of the time the value in original furniture is about the story and its history.

   I built an exact copy of Hans Wegner's "The Chair". It is considered by many to be one of the most beautiful designs of its genre. It owes some of it fame as the Debate Chair, used when Kennedy and Nixon went head-to-head on TV for the US presidency in 1960.

   I know my copy is exact as I have an original, which I used to measure from. Mine is on the left (below). The copy won an award: Editor's Choice for Popular Woodworking in 2016.

   I also recently built two DC09 chairs designed by the Japanese- Scandinavian duo, Kyoko Inoda and Nils Sveje, in 2011 (photo below). My copy (also below) was painstakingly put together from photos on the Internet. I am curious to put it alongside an original to compare.

   All-in-all, this type of work requires a great deal more effort than building one's own design. When you make a mistake or deviation on your own, you just call it deliberate. You will not get away with this on a copy.

   Regards from Perth

   Derek

   
4. 
   Jkatzowitz | Mar 31, 2025 08:19am | #4

   Beautiful work Derek!!! And yes, a beautiful chair design.

5. 
   pantalones868 | Mar 31, 2025 03:33pm | #5

   There is probably very little value in trying to "fake" a piece of antique furniture. Not that much furniture has that high of a value to make it worth it. A highly valued piece, like a Roentgen made for king for example ,would have to be so well made that it would almost certainly come under the eye of conservators who would be very hard to fool. An exact reproduction of some astonishing and rare piece of furniture would still have a pretty hefty sales price on its own as a reproduction without the fraud.
   Many of those mid century danish designs are still in production and had never stopped by the original manufacturers. They are not fakes or reproductions but in my mind originals even though bought new. If I were to try and fake a valuable piece of furniture I would go for the post war studio makers like Maloof or Nakashima or Krenov. Things that were made with the same tools and techniques and materials that we still use.

1. 
   brucecolorado | Apr 02, 2025 12:02am | #6

   $2.9 million total in this case. Not sure how many pieces.