My mother has a beautiful Steinway grand piano she inherited from her father. Anyone familiar with the size of a grand piano knows they more or less require a mid-sized room to themselves or a good chunk of a large room. They're also not worth that much anymore because the market for used grand's is tiny. So mot of the value is sentimental.
We are most likely going to have to get rid of it when she downsizes. My brother and I are unsure where we would ever put it and neither of us play the piano (probably one of my bigger regrets is not learning...). Neither of us want a 4,000SF house especially in New England where 4,000SF probably means older house and lots of maintenance from weather over many years.
Similar problem with the antique dining room and the billiard table (though I may try and save that one if I can).
When I was a child studying piano, my dream was to own a grand piano. My parents could have never afforded such an extravagance, but did own a detached house in Toronto.
Now, I could easily afford a high-end piano, but could never dream of affording a house to put it in.
Baby grands can work very well in a small house. I'm a pianist and I grew up playing a Chickering baby grand. It's a very good sounding piano; I think it sounds better than a lot of larger Steinways and Yamahas I've played. Cost was around $10k in the 1970's.
I grew up in a small house (1100 sqft, 2bd, 1ba), and I think it actually made the L-shaped living room feel bigger, even though it used almost 1/5 of the area.
Are you sure? Have you ever seriously tried to buy a good piano?
I have, and I couldn’t find any cheap ones (i.e. cheaper than a very good digital piano).
The ones that look cheap in the small ads are generally in poor condition. The vintage ones in good condition are expensive, and new ones are expensive.
There's degrees of good. You can buy a respectable upright piano like the one I learned on for a few thousand dollars.
A few years ago I was looking at a Schimmel grand for $30,000 (CAD). That's a big purchase, but I could afford it, especially for something I'd use daily for the rest of my life.
A modest house in Toronto is now over $1 million, and appreciates annually as much as my entire annual net income. I will never afford that.
Are grand pianos actually any better than the best electric pianos? I mean if you're not playing in an actual concert hall. I was in an electricals shop in Japan a couple of years ago and a few of the electric pianos there were wonderful (some were also terrible).
You just can't sample your way out of the problem of getting the sound of many strings resonating when you press a key, especially when you hold the right pedal.
Electronic pianos are good, and I have one, but they are a different instrument that doesn't do what a cheap cabinet piano can.
I will say that the best electric pianos are starting to get very impressive. I was looking for a piano two years ago and tried the latest and greatest electric piano to humor a salesman. I was astounded at the fidelity of their model. If I played a chord, then depressed another set of keys (without actually striking the "string"), and then released the chord, it would catch the resonances from that chord in the "strings" of the depressed keys just like a real piano. I played on that piano for a while and wasn't able to find any behaviors that a real piano had that the electric piano couldn't also do short of reaching in and plucking a string with my fingernail.
The fact that you say "you just can't sample your way out of" indicates that your mental model of how electronic pianos work is about 20 years out of date, because current ones do get the many-strings-interaction right with complex physics models.
I have a Kawai CA97 and a grand piano, and I've occasionally asked guests to close their eyes and guess which one I'm playing, and people are usually not sure at all.
It's easy to fool the audience, but for the pianist it's still night and day. And I don't mean just emulating the control input, though that's not easy either, but more the subtle haptic feedback from the entire instrument- that makes you feel like it's not only you playing the piano, but also the piano is playing you.
Yes, that is a good way of putting it. No one would ask whether an electric guitar is 'better' or 'as good' as an acoustic, they are simply different.
I enjoy owning an electric piano simply because it lets me practise with headphones in a small apartment, but it does not substitute fully for a mechanical piano.
I don't think that even vertical pianos come even close to any electric I played. The stringed one keys just feels different and it has a lot more nuance in sound. Maybe I have never played a really high end one, but in the same price range, just no comparison.
And no, I'm not some kind of nostalgic: whenever somebody gives me a paper book as a gift I try to find the ereader version because I prefer reading on an ebook.
I've used both high end mechanical pianos and high end electronic pianos, and the biggest difference I've noticed is that the electronic pianos only had stereo speakers. Mechanical pianos have spatially separate sound generators for each note, so you get a much better surround-sound effect as you move your head. However, there's no theoretical reason this couldn't be simulated with a sufficiently large number of loudspeakers.
They have apparently improved a lot in the best decade. I mean, ultimately it's just about finding the right algorithm; there are no unreproducible sounds coming out of a piano.
Lots of things that are fully described by relatively elementary physics are still impossible to model in real-time even with the most powerful computers, let alone the $5 microcontroller in an electric piano. You're right that there's no obvious physical reason why a 'perfect' electric piano couldn't exist, but it would probably be way more expensive than just building a mechanical piano which consists entirely of 19th century technology.
Why are you exaggerating the requirements so much? You don’t need it to be perfect and there is no issue with putting a high end SoC in a high end e-piano.
You set the bar at algorithmically reproducing every last sound that comes out of an analog piano. That's a hard problem to solve for the very small number of people who would care enough to purchase such a device when there's a perfectly good analog alternative that's been on the market since before the telephone was invented.
You may think I'm exaggerating the requirements, but I think you're underestimating the difficulty of solving what is at best a very hard physics problem in real time with imperceptible delay as a human carries out a sequence of physical manipulations that has taken them years or decades to learn. My $1,000 phone with the latest, greatest SoC can't open a PDF with a noticeable delay.
If your proposition is a middling approximation of an analog piano, you can already buy that at Costco for $500. Steinway and Bosendorfer don't seem particularly bothered about it.
Even an upright will sound much better than an electric. I've bought one of the best electric pianos you can buy (Yamaha N1 which has the same action as a grand piano) and it still didn't compare.
That's not to say the electric ones are bad but there is just much more nuance you can achieve on an acoustic.
> They're also not worth that much anymore because the market for used grand's is tiny.
To the right buyer that instrument will be worth a small fortune. The reason the market value is not that high is mostly because the few big names gobble up all the instruments they can to reduce the size of the secondary market so they can sell their instruments at the highest price they'll fetch.
That's also why there are hardly ever prices on the websites of the various sellers, they would give a hint about what the instruments value is which would make it harder for them to purchase instruments for a small fraction of their true value.
I recently purchased a grand piano, and in the process I visited a lot of piano stores and got a very good sense of what is available and for how much. Large piano stores in the US will typically have some vintage Steinways for sale, whether or not they carry new Steinways.
Vintage Steinways often sell for roughly $20K. This price may include a lot of prep work by the dealer -- a dealer might replace all the strings, for example. I once visited a shop where the dealer gutted the instruments and more or less rebuilt them from scratch.
It's also reasonably common for dealers to have prices on their websites for used pianos. Not new pianos -- typically manufacturer contracts forbid this, and it's a high margin business.
I'd estimate that one could probably sell a vintage Steinway, if it's in good condition, to a dealer for in the neighborhood of $10K.
One might get more by advertising directly to buyers. However, this is a pain (it typically takes months to sell a piano). Moreover, any knowledgable buyer will hire a technician to inspect the instrument, and this could bring up all sorts of unpleasant surprises -- even if the instrument seems to be in good condition.
>The reason the market value is not that high is mostly because the few big names gobble up all the instruments they can to reduce the size of the secondary market so they can sell their instruments at the highest price they'll fetch.
Is that really a thing? Seems like a great way to lose money.
Not if you are refurbishing them, and then reselling them as "certified used" for a profit. Then you have captured more of the secondary market while still helping to maintain your new prices.
It's like how brand names manufacture "competing" store brand products right next to their brand name stuff.
Dunno about at the start of the endeavor, but if they manage to buy out the whole after-market such that they can build the expectation that no real market exists, then both buyers and sellers will not even attempt to sell/buy at “true” prices, and instead look directly at “certified” and new models only. If I value a car at $5000, but can’t find that price anywhere, then I simply have to accept that its being valued higher by the market. If I want to sell at $5000, but can’t find a buyer, same story. Even if both persons exist simultaneously, if they can’t find each other, then there will be no sale.
So by making use of the information disparity, and manipulating the perception of the used market, it should be possible to keep prices artificially high.
The same kind of strategy works for diamonds at least, where “used” diamonds are not worthy of usage, so prices are simply set by the businesses; I know the video game market is also trying to get in on it, by gobbling up used games (eg through gamestop), keeping them out of the secondary market early (by encouraging sequels, trade-ins, etc), which then lets them set the prices on them later (particularly useful when you want to sell emulated games on the e-shops)
> So by making use of the information disparity, and manipulating the perception of the used market, it should be possible to keep prices artificially high.
It seems like this would be really hard to pull off, though, because apparently they're simulateneously keeping prices artificially low.
I can see them keeping the casual buyer and seller ignorant of each other's existence -- especially if they're fixing up the pianos and selling them as 'certified refurbished' (or whatever), so they're not simply buying low and selling the exact same product high.
But wouldn't the whole thing crumble when a few enthusiasts got together and discussed their experiences as buyers and sellers -- or when a few sellers (whether through ignorance or knowledge) publically and successfully held out for higher prices?
If the general population of buyers does not expect to find grand pianos on craigslist, then why would they end up on craigslist to find it? More likely, the best hope you have is to sell it to someone who found it by accident, probably not even looking for such a thing at the time. And if selling grand pianos on craigslist is sufficiently rare, then it’ll naturally not change anyone’s expectations; it was just a lucky find.
And ofc, if you the adversarial company are purchasing out these rare sales as soon as they’re up, you can trivially maintain the illusion.
That individual sale might cost you more, but if the average seller sells for less because they don’t see a real market to sell in... it’s probably still a profitable illusion.
(I responded to your other comment, but this one covers some of the same ground.)
It still seems strange to me that this would work, when there are so many easy ways for piano enthusiasts to gather and communicate, and when it's such an expensive item (so if you knew the market was being manipulated, you wouldn't just throw up your hands and accept the hit, you'd look for a better deal).
I might be getting confused about the basic claim being made, though -- if sellers can achieve decent prices when they choose to demand them, but often don't realise this and therefore get ripped off by professional buyers; and if buyers can save money by buying directly from individual sellers, but are often unaware of this option (because there aren't a whole lot of pianos being sold this way, and they're not on the market for long); then I guess that does make sense.
I’m in a very similar situation as you: my wife is inheriting a Steinway baby grand piano that needs internal repair, and needs to be shipped from Tucson to the Bay Area. It has a lot of sentimental value but not much resale value. It may cost up to $10k to ship it and get it repaired into a working state.
I live in a 2 bedroom condo in Oakland that cannot possibly fit the thing, nor do either of us play piano anymore. My thought was to repair it and then donate it to a local school auditorium and maybe write off the expenses but I haven’t looked into the details.
FWIW, a friend of a friend wanted to buy a Steinway and donate it to her daughter's prep school so the daughter would have a Steinway to play. (Yes, some people have a lot of money.) The prep school turned her down because they didn't want the cost of maintaining it. Anecdata and perhaps an outlier, but nonetheless.
The best bet would be to try to sell it locally. It may take a long time to find the right buyer, but knowing that the instrument is used and treasured by a musician may appease the sentimental side just as much or even more than keeping it around as a piece of furniture.
>probably one of my bigger regrets is not learning.
I started taking lessons a year ago, and I play well enough now to fool most strangers into thinking I know how to play. :) My highest achievement is playing half of this piece now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d72mZVxdylA (it's not me in the video).
The glut of silverware and fine china is even worse. Nobody uses that stuff, and it's high-maintenance. If you want some cheap, look on eBay.
"Antiques", as an industry, is a product of the 1960s. Before that, antiques were items over a century old, which was the US Customs definition. Anything less was just old. Selling stuff less than a century old as "antique" was a marketing move. Looks like that idea, from the era of the hula hoop, is over.
Silverware is pretty cool to use everyday. I have a couple of silver German forks from the 1800's that have a nice heft and sharp tangs. I wash them by hand and they stay nice and shinny. Silverware gets tarnished if you don't use and wash it but if you use it like regular flatware they are definitely not high-maintenance. Antiseptic too (I think).
Love stainless steel also. It is much stronger than silver, so when whipping up mashed potatoes I never use silver ones. Never had really thought about the metallic taste probably because when using a fork you don't really touch it with your tongue. I don't use spoons often and don't have silver ones.
You see this all over New England and I assume elsewhere. All sorts of antique stores and malls. Some of the stuff they sell is genuinely old quality. An awful lot is just random crap of one sort or another. It’s not a well-defined distinction to be sure.
Some of it is genuinely useful: a 50 year old Sunbeam Mixmaster is going to need some maintenance but will last another few decades if taken care of vs the crap built with plastic gears these days.
I think these antique malls spring up as much as anything from people who valuing these items collecting them. At some point you wake up and realize unless you're going to open a museum you don't actually need 10 examples of whatever.
You either get into buying and selling or you open up a B&B :-) I'm convinced a lot of B&B owners got into it so that they could cover every last surface with cutesy "antiques."
Hah. And with any luck some of your light fingered guests help you reduce your collection.
But seriously I think the appeal of these things also reflects a completely different lifestyle. These days if you really think you'll have unexpected overnight guests you'll have a sleeper sofa instead of a Murphy Bed. My wife collects Singer Featherweight portable electric sewing machines. With the low cost of new and used clothes plus so few learning to sew I can't think of anything more absurdly useless. Although in her defense she's made use of it herself I don't think anyone under 40 would have any use for it unless they're trying to start a retro YouTube channel.
People still repair and modify stuff. A friend of mine literally just replaced a backpack zipper for me. But I agree it’s almost certainly less common than it was.
My grandmother had this rug in the living room. No one could ever set foot on that rug, because she wanted to sell it one day for what she imagined would be a great sum of money.
She never did sell it, but after she died, my father and his brothers imagined it would be worth as much as she had imagined it to be at auction. Long story short, it sold for about $100. 40 years of consternation for $100.
The lesson I learned from all of this is that stuff is just stuff, and the less of it you have when you die the better.
I was shown photos by a family member of rugs being made into antiques in Afghanistan in the 80’s or 90’s. Beautiful rungs were places all over the road outside for the traffic to run over so that they looked older.
it's interesting that different things have value now, your father and brothers would have made out if she had accumulated Lego sets and not let anyone unbox them.
Yes, apparently collector's value arrives in generational waves.
The first wave hits in 20-30 years, when kids grow into productive age, and sentimentally overvalue things from their childhood.
A grandma's rug or ex-libris, is your Lego set or another man's C64… What will today's kids feel sentimental about in 30 years? Better start collecting now.
Only the waves that speak to our craving for beauty and immortality are a safe bet at any time. Beautiful beginnings are where it's at!
Whats interesting is that there is not much to collect anymore. From a third party vantage point it seems childrens entertainment has been devoured whole by mobile addictive skinner boxes. Between social media and that garbage a lot of kids are spending their parents money on virtual coins rather than plastic bricks.
Some years ago I visited the home of an upscale New England family. They had a million-dollar Alexander Calder sculpture on a corner table in the kitchen. At the time this struck me as an odd placement for such a valuable object — I guess this article explains why.
Old furniture not being compatible with laptops and charging cables really shows how utility is always the first priority.
I'm reminded of a YouTube series which walks around malls on the brink of bankruptcy. Malls put forward a psuedo-utopian view of society, a place where people can come together (for commerce), but all of that matters 0% if there's less utility than Amazon.
This is just because people have lost the ability to dare. Make a couple of holes in that baby and suddenly it's useful and beautiful. It's like buying a period house and redoing the wiring: beautiful objects must evolve with the times, even paintings by Leonardo might need new frames every once in a while.
Personally I love bureaus. Before I could afford the space for a home desk and extra monitor, I used an Ikea bureau with my laptop, for years, and i loved it. I looked at local (UK) prices for antique ones, about 10 years ago, but they cost 4 times as much; if prices have really crashed under £100 now, I might get one for my kids. Ergonomy is always an issue though, one has to be careful with proportions.
There are still practical issues in many cases I tend to agree. Unless it is truly a valuable piece, which it probably isn’t, drill a hole in the back. It feels a bit like phobia about making notes in books.
If it is a valuable piece, I don't see how a hole in the back is going to hurt its value as long as it's done well (symmetrical placement, sanded and finished, etc).
Just for future reference for me or anyone else on HN:
I found the George III inlaid mahogany bureau referenced in the story on the Gorringes (Lewes, UK) website [0] and saved to archive.org/is [1][2].
The sale price was £70, and the pre-sale estimate was £100-150. The story referenced a sale price of £85 including fees, so I guess the fees must have been £15.
That was my first thought as well... weight is a consideration, but the utility can be easily fixed with some basic tools and an afternoon. Worst case would be if there's pocket drawers/shelves behind the writing area to remove... but easy enough to do that, putty and paint over it.
> Malls put forward a psuedo-utopian view of society, a place where people can come together (for commerce)
Are you serious?! Cookie cutter strip malls in every American suburb are very close to dystopia to me. I'd think that people who enjoy coming together for shopping would prefer a walkable downtown area with shops that are not chains, but are owned by the people who run them.
That's the only kind of thing that can compete with e-commerce.
Malls were dying long before Amazon and the reason was big box stores, not Amazon. Also most malls pre-2000 or so were barely giving lip service to the community aspect of malls. It was all about shopping and that's it.
Many malls are being successfully revived now specifically because they have meaningfully invested in making them community spaces (stages with daily performances, play areas for kids, even larger and better food courts, chess/checker boards and playing areas, etc) which is something that Amazon can never compete against (unless they get into malls of course).
You see a similar thing with "old mainstreet USA" which for many years people lamented were disappearing because of big box stores and white flight (many many cities in the southeast) which now are vibrant and booming because they invested, again, in community and human experience by widening sidewalks, subsidising new theaters, restaurants and bars, adding cheap or free downtown parking - it all worked! Cities like Winston-Salem, NC (the one I'm most familiar with) that were wastelands in the early 2000's but are amazing places to hang out (and shop!) now.
Anyway, I disagree that it is all about utility. Malls competing head to head with Amazon just on shopping are doomed because what else in that equation are you even offering except utility and savings? But the idea that utility necessarily trumps (twitch) community doesn't jibe with my understanding of the facts.
> Cities like Winston-Salem, NC (the one I'm most familiar with) that were wastelands in the early 2000's but are amazing places to hang out (and shop!) now.
That specific example is an especially good one. I worked downtown in '99 - '01, and the only reason we'd ever spend time downtown outside work hours were the occasional free concerts in the summer. Apart from offices, it felt like a ghost town. Now, when I get back there to visit friends/family, downtown is a real destination. People live there. There are galleries, concerts, good restaurants, breweries, a distillery, theaters... it feels like a really nice small city. At least in the general neighborhood of the Stevens Center.
> Old furniture not being compatible with laptops and charging cables really shows how utility is always the first priority.
Frankly that statement made me cringe. I have a few bureaus like the one in the article at home (my father has a passion for antiques) and the idea of using one of them for writing never crossed anybody's mind. They're obviously not ergonomic, but worse, they might get damaged (you'd rather not lean on the hinged writing surface of a 200 year old piece of furniture, it's not very solid). They're used to keep stuff, either open or closed. Your average papers, mantelpiece objects, assorted stuff, and of course phone and laptops in case of need, fit very well in the drawers and in the top compartment.
That one seems like a problem solved with a drill and a hole-saw bit. At worst some gentle application of pressure, putty and paint (removing drawers and pocket-shelving behind the writing area).
I inherited this beautiful oak dining set from the 1800s. It has immense sentimental value and I badly want to use it. But houses I can afford don't come with dining rooms that fit it. And it's not suitable as an everyday kitchen set.
It came out of a 4000sqft home I grew up in built in 1989 for about 300k CAD. That house is worth about 4x now so despite being more financially successful than my parents, I don't come close to affording it.
I'm left with the heartbreaking reality that there's no room for the dining room set in my future.
Are you really "more financially successful" if you can't afford the same things, though?
Unless you have different priorities, which is fine. Like I could afford some stuff, but "can't" cause that wouldn't let me afford other stuff my parents never had.
Is it, though? Nowadays we keep asking for higher standards, better infrastructures, better access to utilities, communications, commute, etc. Me parents could easily afford a house just after getting married... a house I'm weary of setting foot in, not even remotely built to code, with infrastructures cobbled together over the years.
Maybe a 4x price increase is indeed excessive, but building a house like it was possible 50+ years ago, would be just illegal.
That's mixing realities though. Building a house from 30 years ago is pretty much up to code today. It was a modern house in all the ways you'd expect.
You are right if we go older. But we don't have to go far to prove the point.
There are a lot of places in SV that literally haven’t been seriously renovated since they were built in the 40’s and 50’s going for $1.5M+. 0% interest rates along with NIMBYism and high tech salaried have seriously inflated land prices in CA, at least. I think the first two factors have had a more universal effect, and just multiply the locally available salary range to yield the limits of purchasing power, which becomes the market clearing price of the local homes.
I get the feeling they were talking about something comparable to what their parents had at their age, in location, size, etc. In my experience, this isn't new construction--especially if the location is similar. In the desirable areas (I can't speak specifically to Vancouver, but I imagine it is) they're the same houses; now a generation older.
I could barely afford a house built as a hunting bungalow in 1918, expanded multiple times, in the 60s-70s a lot of unpermitted work was done. Trying to get work done was a nightmare because nothing was to code (some reputable contractors refused to do work). Sure, the appliances were fairly new, the pipes and some of the electrical had been updated, but all of those were relatively minor expenses and most of the upgrades were aesthetic.
Your insurance splits out the cost of the land and "improvements" (the structures) because you're only insuring the house because a flood/fire won't destroy the land. In my case, the cost of rebuilding the house dwarfed the cost of the property itself.
Mostly yes, but it does depend on what you like. Hardwood floors, handmade brick (as opposed to the 9 variations that come out the factory), hardwood weatherboards and nice stonework are not in my price range.
Labour used to be cheap and it’s the labour that makes a place somewhere I’d like to be.
Except there are a lot of places where housing is quite affordable. You can argue that economic value has tended to centralize and you'd mostly be right. OTOH, I have plenty of colleagues living in all manner of relatively low-cost small cities all over the place. (Not a lot who are truly rural but that has a lot to do with communications infrastructure and easy access to airports.)
You might be surprised if you don't require living in a highly walkable downtown core. In many places, such as Eastern Massachusetts, the jobs are pretty distributed around the area; it's only fairly recently that tech jobs have started to be located in the city at all. And you get an hour outside of Boston and there's quite a bit of housing in the $300-$400K range in many towns. That's not Midwest cheap but it's not $1.5M for a teardown either.
Of course, Cambridge and many areas of Boston proper are quite expensive (as are some of the tonier suburbs like Concord).
Silicon Valley is a bit unusual in that you can't really escape from high prices, in spite of being suburban sprawl, because of the geographical constraints.
I would have said the area I live was that a year ago. We saw the most job growth and lowest unemployment in the country, all while my house was likely worth no more than $150,000.
But the most job growth in the country requires that people move there (here) and they require houses when they arrive. With that surprising increase in demand, I expect I could get $250,000 for my house now, which is a staggering increase in a fairly short period of time.
On the other hand, if you're coming from a place where houses are selling for $1,200,000 (the 4 * $300,000 suggested above), then maybe you still see $250,000 as being affordable. We certainly have jobs. Every place of business in the area seems to be hiring.
I find myself in the same situation in Canada. Also more financially successful than my parents at this age, but unable to afford a home here in Vancouver.
Either I'm going to be renting for a very long time, or I'll leave this country again. It's kind of sad that Canadians are getting priced out of their own country!
It's not specific to Canada, you'll get the exact same issue abroad: aside from a few exceptions (e.g. Japan) real estate prices in popular locations keeps climbing ever upwards, significantly faster than income does. I'm guessing real estate is cheaper in YT than it is in Vancouver.
True, Vancouver features pretty highly internationally as a desirable city to live in. But there are lots of desirable cities abroad that aren't nearly as crazy expensive. There are no affordable and really desirable cities in Canada - Halifax is perhaps the closest, but that still falls pretty short of the mark (apologies to people from Halifax, but that's my opinion.)
Hah. Just made the Vancouver to Halifax move for exactly the reasons you cite. It’s a great place to be for young families. Affordable, welcoming, walkable, lots of nature close by. No roots here but did the math and took the path that 20 of our friends have taken and left Vancouver. And not even close to looking back.
It's become much more affordable since the oil recession, although there's less oil related jobs now (but it's good if you're in another industry). As for the weather, it's not terrible, sunny summers and all. But I also like winter, and can drive from my condo to Banff in one hour even.
I don’t know how you got your info about Japan, but even smaller homes in Tokyo (according to Japanese standards) can run up to $500,000. If I’d get something similar to what I’d have in the Netherlands we go up to $1.5M.
Japan is bigger than Tokyo!
Anywhere outside of Tokyo, even in beautiful livable world-class cities, the prices for Japanese homes are quite reasonable.
It's an interesting question, one I have been thinking about too. I'm not sure there is a place that combines a strong university town with easy access to (but separation from) Toronto and room for growth in quite the same way. Maybe St Catherines if they make Brock a huge priority? The former industrial sections are much like Kitchener was, just waiting for the right companies to need cheap space.
Ottawa is always going to be a government town first even though it has it's own tech scene, anything in the GTA gets swallowed by Toronto, Barrie and Brantford don't have universities, Windsor is too far from Toronto, but they might be able to piggyback on Detroit's revival if they play their cards right, London is stagnant and has been for decades, Kingston is on the wrong side of Toronto to really take advantage of Pearson, Guelph has already benefitted from Waterloo's explosion and the north is too harsh for many people.
I came to Waterloo for university about 15 years ago and never left. Despite real estate prices really jumping up, the investment in transit and transport through the region might mean south Kitchener and Cambridge are the next Waterloo.
Same here. I dropped out of the vancouver tech/law ratrace. Now im working for a government agency on the island. Slightly less pay but greater takehome.
Even if you have the space, a lot of antique furniture just doesn't fit with modern lifestyles. Even if I had a big formal dining room, as in the house I grew up it, I'd use it once in a blue moon.
The article also notes furniture like rolltop desks. My dad has a beautiful one that mostly serves as a display cabinet in his living room. I'm honestly not sure what I would do with it. I have my own shelving to display things and it would be pretty useless for any actual work I do. (As I kid I really loved sitting at that desk and doing kid-like scribbling at it.)
Furniture of the future >> 1) cabled for power and internet access, 2) holes between seat cushions so that food crumbs fall through, and 3) off the floor by 4 to 6 inches to allow for unimpeded roomba access
I laughed, likely too hard, at this. We’ve got three kids under 6 and our current living room furniture does in fact allow crumbs to fall through and I was praising them just yesterday for that accidental function.
They’re a pretty nice leather love seat and couch we purchased new about 8 years ago. The leather has been a god send for spills and no stains, etc.
Unfortunately our roomba ALWAYS gets stuck on them. If we get one full run a week it’s a minor miracle. So on this very day I finally hit the garage, pulled out the welder and grinder and am giving my couch and loveseat a 1” lift.
Fair enough. If you have enough extra space to have a large formal dining room, you can find something to do with it even if you don't have a lot of big dinner parties. (At one point I wanted to have a billiard room but my (then separated from the kitchen) dining room just wasn't big enough.
A big table is at least fairly multipurpose if you have the space. A lot of other furniture is a lot less so.
Until your wife gets tired of them. Now I have two beautiful well kept GeekChic tables for sale and have a fancy natural wood dining room table with two halves and glass between them. Very pretty but no gaming capability beyond a large mostly flat surface.
If you need to find it a good home, let me know. I have a good place for it in my... oh wait, I'm thinking of the 3000 ft^2 home I grew up in. My 250 ft^2 apartment doesn't have space, or a kitchen, and the rent is 200% what my parents paid on the 1982 mortgage for the 3000 ft^2 :P
Here's positive thinking for you... I laugh every time I think about how comically small my apartment is compared to any place I've previously lived, then I sigh. After the sigh, I make myself laugh again because it is quite hilarious. Sigh... Ha!
I hate to ask, but could a creative woodworker cut it down to size? I suppose one could do some business on the side, of buying attractive but huge pieces and figuring out how to repurpose them, since the beautiful old wood doesn't exist any more.
Would you still use it more than once a week if you had a room for it? The trend towards open kitchens has seriously reduced the need for a formal dining room (except when listing a house for sale.)
Credit has been nearly free for a long time. Cheap money increases buyer leverage, which translates into higher prices. Plus large numbers of immigrants in big cities a big factor. Buying a home is generally #1 focus of new Canadians, They’re a big enough block of market participants to move prices.
Lots of other factors of course. I imagine since R/E market is hyper local, country-wide stats won’t really give an accurate picture postal code to postal code.
It's a set of six chairs and a rounded table that slides apart to fit 14. Part of the sentiment is that my extended family would have Christmas dinner at it every year. Now that I have kids I wanted to continue my generation of that tradition. It's not so much about making the table smaller. It's that the table and the tradition doesn't exactly fit in the kinds of houses in my city these days.
I don't really buy this argument. By that logic, collectible cars should not be worth much because new ones are just at good for driving, and collectible cars are seldom driven anyway. Homes outside of the cramped Bay Area and central New York are pretty big.
Apples and oranges - many people have ‘room’ for an extra car or two, but most people don’t have an actual room for an antique dining table or space for a mahogany bureau in their home office.
Even if they had the space, it likely wouldn’t match any of the usable furniture, and that furniture is necessary. Cars don’t need to match...
While it would be an insane choice, I actually have a spare garage spot (mandated by LA county law), but a very small apartment. I could afford the space for a classic car, but not a piece of furniture the exact same size.
I think part of its scale too. We’ve been making desks for a long time, and they’re pretty durable. Cars are newer, and frankly most of them got cubed anyways. There’s not a lot of desirable cars around, fewer each day as they break and crash, which is why the prices rise.
This report[1] suggests less that 2,000 sq-ft on average for most of the Bay Area sold in the past 12 months. Based on median lot size for detached home sales (0.25 acre in Diablo Valley being the largest by a huge margin; 2,500 sq-ft lots in SF), most are certainly multi-story units.
In summary: less than 2,000 sq-ft, appreciably less than 0.25 acre lot, multi-story.
I think that a lot of people renting can attribute to this too. No ones wants to move around these dense hard oak wood furniture. I rather move around something light from IKEA until I can buy a house. But then by the time I afford a house, I wouldn't be able to fit these furniture anyway in my abysmally small house.
This. My wife's particle-board computer desk has survived two moves -- barely. It will almost certainly not survive another, so getting rid of it is a real problem.
I’ve had plenty of Ikea furniture survive multiple moves across state and manhandled by buddies paid in beer. If you assemble it correctly, most of it is incredibly durable.
Unless you’re talking about the cheapest of value furniture from Ikea, or your desk is from some other company, I really can’t fathom it not surviving something as simple as moving it.
The problem is not just that it's made of particle board that is held together with a small number of fasteners and nothing else, but it's also a very awkward shape. It's very hard to move without putting a lot of stress on joints that were not designed to take it.
I got rid of an entire large sofa buy dismantling/cutting it up into small pieces and disposing of them with my household rubbish. A circular saw would make light work of a desk like that, but a handsaw would work fine too.
I and a couple friends I helped move had a pretty good experience for IKEA stuff. We opted not to take apart the furniture unless neccesary except for tables. Most of the furniture survived except a couple scratches. I personally like to choose the series thats thicker. Wayfair on the other hand is a hit or miss. Maybe it's because we can't tell the quality online.
It may not be worth as much nowadays but antique furniture sure looks nicer than plastic furniture and bar stools if you have the right type of home for it.
You are spot on. We bought a large pre-foreclosure house in Florida that was once owned by a pretty famous old-Hollywood celebrity. When we bought it, it was utterly dilapidated. Over the years we have slowly fixed and polished everything and furnished it with extremely cheap but sturdy wooden antiques. Instead of modern/Ikea bookcases, we bought antique chests and cabinets for third of the price. Honestly most of the pieces cost more in moving/shipping than material.
For a solid year my wife and I went to estate sales or pre-retirement-home-move garage sales every weekend and bought 20+ paintings depicting local Florida nature to line up our hallways. We barely spent $2000 on paintings and furniture combined to furnish living room, family room, dining room, hallways, bathrooms, and 5 bedrooms (ignoring beds). Our guests often remark how gorgeous our house looks because of the antiques.
We got lucky that the house we bought goes well with antiques. Otherwise we would have easily spent $10k+ on comparable furnishing.
Man that heatmap of space usage. Painfully accurate. We had a dining room we never used except on special occasions, instead cramming around a tiny table in the kitchen. We had and furnished a living room, but without a TV it was dead to us. So much wasted space.
My mom's been an antique dealer for most of my life, and she's noticed this trend as well. Her customer base has aged along with her, and younger folks are not, generally, as interested in antiques as the previous few generations.
She has several theories about the shift, one of them is that the things my generation and younger are sentimental or nostalgic about are just different than prior generations: Big dinners with family in a formal dining room (with all the accoutrement that entails, like a buffet table, nice China, silverware, crystal glasses, etc.) were common up until the 80s, even among the middle class, but houses for the middle class don't even have dining rooms anymore and haven't since about the late 80s. Or, having a desk where mom and dad did taxes, wrote letters and cards, etc., maybe it'd be passed down, or maybe when you grew into adulthood, you'd get a desk for your own correspondence and the general business of running a household. Sewing machines used to be a thing passed from mother to daughter...nobody sews, anymore. My younger friends don't have memories of their moms sewing costumes for them at Halloween (in general), whereas I do, and it's a pretty cherished memory (and I own a sewing machine, and have owned big oak desks like the one my dad had in his office). Houses have large closets now, no need for an armoire. Kitchens have walk-in pantries or deep cabinets with racks on drawer runners, making pantry cabinets obsolete and a waste of space.
And, of course, stuff like fine China has always been aspirational for a specific kind of buyer...and it requires a lot of space for display, which without a dining room, most people don't have. And, mass-produced goods can be "fancy" in ways that cost a lot of money in previous centuries. It no longer means anything to have a plate with fancy designs on it, because manufacturers can churn out a few million of them every year and profitably sell them for a few bucks.
In some regards antiques were a manufactured aspirational industry, like diamonds or luxury cars or bags or whatever. In other regards, though, they're a recognition that things used to be better made than they have been in our lifetimes. Furniture up until the mid-1800s was entirely hand-made, and it didn't start being made to be disposable until the mid-1900s. Even long after furniture making was at least partially automated, it was still made of real hard woods that would last centuries. New furniture is effectively garbage waiting to happen; you buy it today and in ten years it's on the side of the road with the rest of the trash.
Several factors have converged to make antiques a shrinking market. It also means antique furniture is a real bargain, especially compared to the garbage that even expensive furniture brands are shoveling out these days.
“Period furniture” has fallen out of favor for hobbyist woodworkers as well. Furniture is fashion and that fashion moved from period furniture to midmod. There was high quality hand made midmod furniture (Maloof, etc) and a lot of people (including myself) have repro’d it.
Is this why a lot of people including myself prefer places with an open plan kitchen? You might as well have all the living area as one big room is you're always gonna be in the food preparation area.
I work full time remote from my laptop and somehow I'm always just sitting on the kitchen island. Or within View of it.
The very idea of a distinction between "living room" and "family room" is a foreign one to me, before you even get to the idea of a clear distinction between kitchen and dining room.
I heard there is a trend of big houses now having two kitchens because everyone lives in the kitchen. One kitchen is for cooking in and getting messy (the smaller one) and the other is a display kitchen where people hang out but only used on special occasions or when you want to get your Martha Stewart on.
Sadly we live in a culture where a lot of people care more about fashion than quality and craftsmanship.
Our house is filled with beautiful French furniture, not because it will increase in value - simply that it every piece has wonderful character, lasts forever and tells a story.
The last time I went into an Ethan Allen (with a girlfriend that wanted nice new furniture), I noted that a lot of their furniture is at least partially made of particle board. I was astounded...they aren't super expensive, as furniture goes, but they aren't cheap either. My mom is an antique dealer, so I grew up around good furniture, and the notion that anyone would pay money (any money at all) for furniture that's made to be disposable is difficult to comprehend for me.
The reasons for buying new furniture are even fewer now that the market for antiques has tanked. My mom still has a couple of booths in antique malls and she makes money at it, but nothing like she used to, and she's mostly pivoted from a focus on furniture to glassware and smaller collectibles. The shift is partly because she's older and can't handled bigger items, anymore, especially without my dad to help, but also because the market for antique furniture isn't what it used to be. People are a lot more likely to have space for a nice piece of glassware than for an armoire or buffet table.
You can buy great old or antique furniture for less than new, and it'll be better made, it'll age better, and it'll hold its value better (it probably won't really go up in value, like antiques once did, but it likely won't drop too much either, whereas new particle board furniture is absolutely going in the trash or by the road in ten years).
If price isn't a major concern (i.e. you're willing to pay prices only slightly lower than new furniture prices for antique and older furniture from the era when it was all made of real hard woods), and want to just buy something good quickly, antique malls are a great choice. This will be retail prices, which is at the high end of the old furniture pricing scale, but you can walk around and see dozens or hundreds of pieces in an afternoon of shopping. Also, most of the time, the items will be in good usable condition right off the floor; my mom, when she dealt mostly with furniture, would restore/refinish/re-upholster anything that needed attention before she put it in her booth (as long as that attention wouldn't hurt the value, by stripping away something intrinsically interesting about the piece). You can also often get a small (10-15%) discount just by asking. You can make offers, but they'll have to call the owner of the item to make any sale that isn't pre-arranged (my mom, I think, has a standing instruction with the folks who run the antique malls where she sells to allow a 10% discount if the person is buying with cash right then, repeat customers may have even better deals available to them).
If you want to get a bargain and can invest time, my mom buys at garage sales, flea markets, thrift stores, and auctions, in that order (with garage sales being, by far, the best place to get good prices, but also the most time-intensive). Estate sales (a sale after someone has died and their entire house is being emptied out for sale) in old neighborhoods are the best option for finding antiques and old furniture. But, these days, even estate sales may have no good furniture. The first generation to start buying mass-produced trash furniture is now beginning to be among the folks dying and leaving an estate to be dealt with by their family.
There are also often antique expos in most major cities, where lots of dealers come from surrounding cities to sell; happens a couple times a year, generally. Again, this will be retail prices and maybe even higher, but you have a lot to choose from. If you're looking for stuff that doesn't sell well, you can drop in at the end of the last day and make offers on stuff you like...they don't want to load it up and carry it back home, so they'll let it go for a song. As recently as a decade ago, I was able to buy some really nice Mid-Century Modern stuff at a good price this way (good enough that I made a modest profit when I moved a couple years later and sold those pieces on craisglist).
But, I usually buy on Craigslist. It allows me to setup searches for specific items I want, and I can make offers when things come up that I like, even if the price isn't quite right. People on craisglist may or may not know the right price for something, and often just want it gone. For mass-produced stuff, you can often figure out what the right price is by searching on eBay for recent "Sold" listings. This is not as cheap as garage sale prices can be, and if there is a bargain you have to jump on it immediately, but you don't have to invest a lot of time or wake up at the butt crack of dawn to find good stuff at fair prices.
Unfortunately, craigslist is in decline, so you also may want to check Facebook marketplace (which is a usability trash fire, and I hate it, but lots of people use it). It's nowhere near as usable, in terms of saving searches and getting notifications about stuff you might want, and it doesn't really have good filters like craigslist.
Speaking of getting deals, when you're in the market for stuff like this, carry a nice chunk of cash with you everywhere. Paying cash can get you discounts with a lot of the folks who sell antiques. They aren't often technically savvy, and their credit card fees are often very high (like 3-5%, and the venue they sell in may even add some extras on top for card transactions). And, while most professionals in the business are keeping good records and paying taxes on everything (and malls definitely are), a lot of people for whom antiques and collectibles is a side hustle, as you find at flea markets and expo events, will be happy to have some money that's not on the books.
Also note that it doesn't have to be an antique to be great furniture. Quality, solid hardwood furniture was being made for the mass market, and is thus widely available on the used market, well into the 70s (though particle board began being used sometime in the 40s and 50s, in limited amounts). Depending on your style preference, you may find furniture that is merely "old" rather than antique, but that is still something you'll love.
I enjoy mid-century modern furniture, for example, though because it has become trendy in the past decade, it's no longer as much of a bargain as it used to be (this is another trend my mom has noticed...the era of stuff people are still buying has shifted forward in time, I guess to whatever people's parents and grandparents had in their houses when they were growing up, so it's what has nostalgic value for them, 30-somethings furnishing their houses probably spent their early formative years in mid-century modern furnished houses). But, I also really enjoy the era before that...1900s through the 1940s was an excellent era in American furniture, if you don't want to spend a lot of money. It was beginning to be machine-manufactured, so there's a lot of it out there, and it was made from our vast hardwood forests that had yet to be depleted. And, I tend to prefer simple, utilitarian, American styles over more ornate older European inspired styles, which used to be a good thing when hunting for bargains, but now it's among the stronger periods and styles (while others, like French antiques, have tanked in value a lot, newer American eras and styles have held pretty firm...partly that's also because American styles and newer eras just didn't have far to fall, as they were cheap to start with).
I think you are appreciating arts and crafts / craftsman furniture, a movement which did originate in Europe (well, uk) that was a reaction against unnecesssry ornamentation and was also guided by / a movement for the politics of work. Very very sturdy and bombproof designs. Not my bag, but some folks love it.
Yes, Craftsman stuff is great, and I like Shaker furniture styles, as well, which is similarly simple/utilitarian, but has its own characteristics. All of my favorite stuff I've owned has been from American makers. Not surprising since I'm cheap and live in America, so the good stuff that's widely available enough to be cheap is American.
"Bombproof" seems like it would imply heaviness or blockiness, which isn't among the characteristics of the pieces I like. There's actually a certain delicacy and balance that is the defining characteristic of the pieces I like (though there are some clunky pieces, as well). I like the feeling that the piece has exactly the right number of pieces made of exactly the right amount of wood and at a human scale (i.e. not large, the way a lot of "expensive" furniture is). I also like the wood choices...oak is super common for these styles from these eras, and when it's 100 years old it weighs almost nothing while still being incredibly strong. It's a perfect balance of things I like in furniture.
Do you think being made of particleboard means furniture is made to be disposable?
In my experience, particleboard furniture can be of pretty good quality - often better than low-end solid wood furniture, as particleboard is free of warping and knots.
Whether intentional or not, it is just a basic fact that particle board wears extremely poorly. If it gets damp, it expands and warps and veneers lift up and crack, if the veneer gets scratched deeply enough to expose the particle board, you generally can't sand it and refinish it. Corners get banged up, exposing the particle board beneath, which is then more subject to wear and moisture, accelerating the process that leads to the piece ending up on the curb.
Particle board furniture also weighs more than furniture made of real hardwoods, often a lot more. Making it harder to take with you when you move, and harder to sell used. Particle board doesn't handle being taken apart and put back together (e.g. taking legs off of something to get it through a door) as well as real wood does.
There are several good reasons furniture is made of particle board today (primarily that humanity chewed through the world's old growth hardwoods over the past couple of centuries, and it'll take more than a few of our lifetimes for them to return if humanity survives long enough to figure out how to be responsible stewards of forests), but there aren't any reasons for consumers to prefer particle board over hardwood furniture from the past, especially when real hardwood furniture from the past is cheaper than new particle board furniture.
Let's just say that I've seen a lot of furniture in my life and I have never seen an old (i.e. mid-century, when it began to be a thing manufacturers toyed with) piece of predominantly particle board furniture that I'd want in my house, have you? I have, on the other hand, seen and owned pieces of hardwood furniture that were still beautiful and functional at well over a hundred years old (you can find older than that, too, but, at least in the US, you'll find that even in this poor antiques market they're likely more expensive than similar new furniture).
I personally won't own particle board furniture. I won't buy it from Ikea (technological and logistical marvel it may be, good furniture it is not), or from Ethan Allen, or anyone else, no matter how beautiful it looks on the showroom floor. Because, I know that in a few years, it will look much worse than a good piece of hardwood furniture. And, I'll probably have needed to move it at least once, and it really is often stupidly heavy.
The guitar market is dealing with this problem, too. Moving to other woods that aren't quite as difficult/expensive to come by. And, they're even beginning to use artificial woods.
I have an old hardwood floor. We were getting some work done and I asked for some ex demolition flooring to be put in. It was, and looks good but it had no nail holes and I asked about this. It turned out it was new and was wood helicoptered out after a big storm.
I wasn’t that happy as newish wood still shrinks, isn’t as hard and is a bit lighter in colour, quite apart from the dubious method of acquisition.
This is a really important point. Something may look really slick and nice now, but how is it going to look as it ages? Old wood, brick, stone, stucco, age very nicely. Old plastic and particle board, not so much.
The problem is that it's very difficult to gauge craftsmanship. In my experience, most expensive items I encounter are just cheap items with more features.
the article uses a 10 year old study conducted in California to explain why antique auctions near London command lower than expected prices today. i can't figure out if this is insightful brilliance or nonsense.
In big old houses many of the formal rooms were hardly used - or that’s what I’ve been led to believe. Formal dining and sitting rooms were for special occasions and the kitchen was where people ate otherwise. Even the front door was rarely used. Villa/bungalow design (these count as old where I am) clearly delineate formal and informal areas, with the back of the house for day to day living.
It would be interesting to compare the study to historic usage as it may be less of a change than first glance would show.
I'd side with nonsense. The house map from that study is unfamiliar to me as an American. Growing up, our living room and family room were the same. We didn't have a separate dining room and breakfast nook. And we sure as hell didn't have a single room dedicated to a piano.
Also American. East coast. I've been in tons of houses with separate dining rooms, as well as living / family rooms.
And yeah, nobody used em. A friend of mine growing up had both living and family room in his house. One was used all the time. The other was untouched, pristine. Like they might have even had plastic covering the furniture. We weren't supposed to play there; it was only for formal entertaining.
My in laws also have a separate living room with a piano in it. And besides the off chance someone tried playing chopsticks, the room is unused. Infact, most of us put our coats there. The family room has a TV in it, so everyone goes in there.
Heck, the house I grew up in had both a kitchen and dining room. I think the dining room only got used on holidays when we had guests over.
Not sure why you haven't seen as much. Might have to do with the size of the house, demographics, or region.
But boy, are they stupid. Rooms everyone thinks they need, but nobody uses.
Grew up on the old continent. Except for the family room/front porch, this is almost the exact layout of my parents' house. Any they built it in the 80s. Even if I would build my own today... piano room would be there. Maybe mixing it Piano/Library.
My mom is an antique dealer of ~35 years. Her experience is consistent with the article's assertions. The market for antique furniture (and antiques, in general) has fallen off considerably.
I think it's just misapprehended, a lot of the crash of value is just aesthetics. People are keen on modernist shiny stuff. They don't much like fussy dark big heavy things.
Dining tables are an exception; home entertaining has fallen from fashion as women are not at home all day to do the work required, people aren't doing dinner parties and they tend to have smaller families than in the past as well.
FYI: baroque period is 17th and 18th century. Victorian is in 19th to very early 20th century. There was a baroque revival in the late 19th century which complicates things :) in the world of furniture, they are distinct.
The softening demand for antiques may also be partly due to changing style preferences. Look at the production design in movies and catalog shoots or the way homes are staged for listings—you’ll see more farmhouse tables or mid century modern and less traditional furniture. It would be interesting to see how the price of modern vintage items has fared compared to traditional antiques.
The UK antiques market crashed around 1990. Recent downturns due to a multitude of reasons are relative rounding errors.
There was a time when antiques went for crazy money and you did envy people who had got phenomenally rich during the craze that predated that huge crash. Antique dealers had their 'stock' at home and they lived a charmed existence going off to auction houses, getting better rates at the bank, fiddling taxes, learning about history, living in houses full of things you could not touch, driving big Volvo estate cars and not having to work 9 to 5.
It all went wrong because it was a speculative bubble and the wheeler-dealer antique dealers ended up the bag holders, with all of the debt and nobody wanting to buy from them. On the surface it appeared as if it had been a classic market of arbitrage, this was before the Internet and before TV shows (Antiques Road Show, Lovejoy) that popularised what the antique dealers had been doing.
But then when it crashed it became a bit more obvious what had really been going on, the antique dealers had been buying and selling amongst themselves, the price going up each time with no genuine customers buying this stuff. So the grand house of the antique dealer with all of that priceless stuff you dared not to touch really was useless cruft.
The letter writing bureau scoffed at in the article had some utility, during peak antiques hype such a bureau wouldn't have someone writing letters at it, it might have the land-line phone on it and keep private papers inside, but it wouldn't be strictly useless, it would be valuable 'stock'. There were antiques that were vastly more useless than a writing bureau, with no utility whatsoever.
Pricing was also special information, only a reputable antiques dealer could tell you the true price of something unless it went up to London to go to auction. Local auctions in places like Tetbury (Gloucestershire, famous for antiques) were only attended by people in the trade, if you did go there as a layperson then you just wouldn't understand it, plus laypeople had proper day jobs that precluded such shenanigans.
The tax scam aspect was because the antiques really were unlicensed securities, you could have an antiques dealer buy that letter writing bureau and fiddle the VAT on the purchase in a multitude of ways. Plus interest rates were significant then so you only got rates beyond what normal people had access to if you borrowed a whole lot of money on a business rather than person basis. This was where the regular money was being made, this masked the bag-holding eventuality of the trade back then.
The TV shows came along to glamorise the game and the TV shows came along to give everything a price. Obviously there was eBay, changing demographics, changing travel patterns, the death of the High Street, straightforward fashion, IKEA, AirBnB and everything else. This may have wiped out the scraps that were left after the big crash of the early 1990's, but really the original game and the lifestyle that went with it was something quite gravity defying, driven by greed. Everyone so busy being greedy that the antique dealers didn't realise until too late that they were only trading amongst themselves and that they were to be the ultimate bag holders.
Reminds me of a Paul Graham essay about the 90's dotcom boom:
"By 1998, Yahoo was the beneficiary of a de facto Ponzi scheme. Investors were excited about the Internet. One reason they were excited was Yahoo's revenue growth. So they invested in new Internet startups. The startups then used the money to buy ads on Yahoo to get traffic. Which caused yet more revenue growth for Yahoo, and further convinced investors the Internet was worth investing in. When I realized this one day, sitting in my cubicle, I jumped up like Archimedes in his bathtub, except instead of "Eureka!" I was shouting "Sell!""
> But then when it crashed it became a bit more obvious what had really been going on, the antique dealers had been buying and selling amongst themselves, the price going up each time with no genuine customers buying this stuff.
How would this work from a cash flow perspective? If no external customers buy anything, then every sale reduces the wealth of the group. That doesn't sound like it could last very long at all. You'd need all antique dealers to be independently wealthy.
I think part of it is bulk, weight and moving around. So many people in recent generations will flip out of a house in 5-10 years. So few will invest and stay long enough to pay off a mortgage. Hardwood furniture is heavy, and a pain to move. And while I even appreciate it, it's not fun moving it.
I do think there's a lot to be said for repurposing what you can. I think of all the old, big, heavy stereo and television cabinets and what they could be turned into today. Even if modern equivalents, etc. Most often I've seen older china cabinets used as modern display or liquor cabinets.
I see 7 dots over the toilet and only 1 at the sink. I choose to believe that someone was taking a >1 hour long shit and washing their hands for over 10 minutes (understandable tbh)
There’s also general trends. Modern (mid-century and more-recent) furniture is more trendy. I wouldn’t want much pre-modern furniture even if it is beautifully made and fits my life functionally.
We are most likely going to have to get rid of it when she downsizes. My brother and I are unsure where we would ever put it and neither of us play the piano (probably one of my bigger regrets is not learning...). Neither of us want a 4,000SF house especially in New England where 4,000SF probably means older house and lots of maintenance from weather over many years.
Similar problem with the antique dining room and the billiard table (though I may try and save that one if I can).