Smithsonian-inspired Furniture collection

The Smithsonian collection from Bernhardt Furniture is based not only on pieces owned by the popular museums in Washington, D.C., but also on the structures themselves. The pattern in the glass front of a china cabinet, for instance, is based on a window in the Castle, the original museum dating to 1855.

The sleek and surprisingly contemporary Campeachy leather chair and ottoman is based on an early 19th-century piece that Thomas Jefferson discovered in New Orleans. The Legacy sleigh bed was inspired by a pictured discovered in the Cooper-Hewitt library of the Smithsonian, which houses books on the decorative arts.

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FROM OLD FURNITURE TO GARDEN TREASURE

Beautifully-crafted garden benches and bird boxes catch the eyes of shoppers strolling along Newland Avenue in the sunshine.

The craftsmanship belies the price tags, causing many to stop to admire the work before heading inside the shop.

For a bargain price of £55, you can snap up a three-seater garden bench. Cube-shaped planters start at £8 while bird boxes cost the pocket money price of just £2, a fraction of the amount charged in DIY stores and garden centres.

If that’s not enough of a pull, the goods outside Recycling Unlimited have been made from reclaimed timber, broken furniture or old pallets, restored and brought back to life by a team of volunteers.

Unlike media-savvy supermarket chains and major companies, who herald the tiniest of environmental moves, Peter Rowson, of Recycling Unlimited, is quiet and unassuming about its ethos.

“We want to look after the environment,” he said. “We don’t think people should be burying so much stuff into the ground for future generations to live with.”

As well as helping the environment by preventing the discarded wood being sent to landfill sites, every piece has been made by long-term unemployed or people recovering from mental health problems such as depression.

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Irish Furniture, Gutsy and Ebullient, in a Book and a Sale

Christie’s sale of English furniture on Monday in New York includes some 18th-century Irish antiques, each carefully notated in the catalog with a typically Irish winged-harp symbol. The harp is helpful, because it can be difficult to identify 18th-century Irish antiques.

Even experts become confused, but help is on the way. Yale University Press has just published “Irish Furniture,” by Desmond FitzGerald, an expert in Irish antiques, and James Peill, a furniture specialist at Christie’s New York. The book has been in the works for more than 40 years.

“In the 1960s, when I was a curator at the Victoria and Albert, there was practically no Irish furniture there,” Mr. FitzGerald said. “It was not regarded as having any importance, but I started buying it for myself.

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Wicker furniture popular from ancient Egypt until now

Wicker furniture has been used since the ancient Egyptians, but most of today’s collectors are buying pieces made in the 1800s and 1900s.

In the early 1830s, a Boston grocer named Cyrus Wakefield was watching ships unpacking cargo. Bundles of rattan wrapping were discarded. He thought it might be suitable as a material for furniture, especially chair seats. After experimenting, he developed braided wicker furniture and even had ships import more cane and rattan. His Wakefield Rattan Co. was founded in 1855.

Heywood Brothers, founded in 1861 by Levi Heywood, was the largest chair company in the United States by 1870. The company began making wicker furniture in 1875 using rattan bought from Wakefield. The two companies merged in 1897.

Many styles of wicker furniture were made, including Victorian, Arts and Crafts, and Art Deco. Plant stands, easels, fishbowl-planters, shelves, baby carriages, wheelchairs, cribs and even lamps and lampshades were made. The wicker was shellacked, stained or painted.

Today, collectors pay the highest prices for wicker with elaborate curves and intricate designs. They also favor the unusual.
Clifton Indian ware

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Unique furniture from locally salvaged trees

When the massive elm tree outside Joan Murray’s Madison Park home came down with Dutch elm disease, Murray and husband Mark organized a wake so the neighborhood could mourn the leafy, 100-foot giant boasting 120 rings. (They counted.)

But Joan Murray didn’t have a plan for the tree’s afterlife — not until Jim Newsom showed up and proposed one.

Newsom owns Urban Hardwoods, a Seattle furniture company that does custom work and builds elegant tables and other pieces using mostly locally salvaged trees. Back in 2003, when Newsom explained his company to the Murrays, he asked for the elm, offering in exchange a custom-built table. The Murrays agreed. Their 4-foot round table now sits near a window overlooking the spot where the tree stood. The rest of the tree went to two homes on Orcas Island, while some lumber is still waiting to be made into tables.

“It’s like good karma,” Joan Murray said. “I love that we can sit at that table and remember the tree

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Fast Piece of Furniture

Jeff Nelson likes to sit down. That’s a natural position for a drummer, sure, but it’s also the only theory that explains why the former member of the High Back Chairs is now drumming for Toledo, Ohio’s Fast Piece of Furniture. Or maybe it’s just that he likes singer and guitarist Tony Lowe’s dusky voice and jangly songs, which coaxed the D.C. legend out of retirement. Adventures in Contentment, the group’s debut, doesn’t confine itself to the living room, touching on garage rock (“Can I Believe in You?”), bedroom psychedelia (“Miles From Nowhere”), and chamber pop (“Out of Time”). Underpinning it all is an appealing sense of wide-eyed melancholy and optimism despite all evidence to the contrary. Lowe’s tales of relationships that have gone wrong, are going wrong, or almost certainly will implode if you give him half a chance can get a little claustrophobic, but his band’s gentle power pop sure sits easy. Fast Piece of Furniture performs with Everyone But Pete and cobbler at 9:30 p.m. at Iota Club & Cafe, 2832 Wilson Blvd., Arlington. $10. (703) 522-8340.

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Antique or not, small furniture is what she seeks

Marcia Wilk has a soft spot for small things — especially small furniture. She has about a dozen pieces spread throughout her Grosse Pointe Park home.

“It’s not dollhouse or child-size it’s in between,” she explains. “It was made by carpenters and woodworkers as a craft to show off their work. It didn’t really serve a purpose, although many people mistakenly think these items were salesmen’s samples.”

Wilk has been collecting the wooden pieces about 20 years. She purchased her first piece — a small icebox — many years ago while living in her native Pennsylvania. Since then, she’s picked up chairs, dressers, desks and other examples.

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Antique furniture destroyed in factory fire

A fire at a factory in Tauranga over the weekend destroyed many valuable pieces of antique furniture.

Eight fire crews spent six hours putting out the fire at the furniture restorers Cartmill & Parish on Saturday night.

Tauranga Fire Safety Officer Ken McKeagg said the restoration area was completely destroyed, as well as all the furniture inside.

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Old-world quality furniture that’s built in Windsor Heights

New furniture is easy to find. Antiques aren’t exactly scarce. But some people want a chair or a sideboard to perfectly match a roomful of antiques, or a chest of drawers that exists only vaguely in their imaginations, and those are the customers Kyle Smith is looking for.

Smith started his woodworking career as an Iowa farm boy near Audubon. At 28, he operates a start-up business, Smith Co. Artisans, out of his home in Windsor Heights. In between, he studied the craft of furniture making at the University of Rio Grande - it’s not where you think; it’s in Ohio - and worked with period furniture makers in Philadelphia.

Walk into his house and you’re surrounded by wonderful examples of Smith’s talent. Many pieces feature hand-carved details defining them as the work of a man who has thoroughly developed his skills. He’s in the midst of making and installing a fireplace surround, complete with carved flowers, as part of transforming the main part of the first floor of his home into a showroom.

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Good wood on antiques

One place to appreciate the real, rare red sandalwood furniture of the Ming and Qing dynasties is to visit the China Red Sandalwood Museum.

Almost 20,000 visitors took advantage of free entry to the museum on May 18, International Museum Day, where they enjoyed the genuine antique furniture and reproductions.

Squatting in front of a Ming-Dynasty cabinet, Gao Jianhua, a furniture enthusiast from Shandong Province, used a magnifying glass to study the detailed patterns carved on the furniture. “Ming furniture features flat backs decorated with straight or curved wooden patterns and is sometimes embedded with marbles,” Gao said.

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