Features

Welsh auction house Rogers Jones (26.4% buyer’s premium inc VAT) recently conducted its largest house clearance in over 30 years: the principal contents of Plas Teg in Flintshire.

Whatever interior statement one hopes to achieve, it is so often the furniture that really makes a room.

Estimated at €1000, this 19th century Irish mahogany bureau with a link to Sir Winston Churchill sold for €9500 (£8000) at Fonsie Mealy (25% buyer’s premium) in Castlecomer, Co Kilkenny.

A number of hall chairs of this idiosyncratic type from the early years of the ‘age of mahogany’ are known and have appeared on the market.

What a difference three years and an estimate can make.

The second part of the Beedham Collection – a fine array of early oak furniture and associated works of art from the Derbyshire dealing family – came for sale at Bishop & Miller (25% buyer’s premium) in Glandford, Norfolk, on March 19.

The contents of the Bishop’s House in Newry, standing on the Clanrye river in counties Down and Armagh, were sold by Victor Mee (20% buyer’s premium) earlier this year.

A recent sale at Burstow & Hewitt (20% buyer’s premium) in Battle, East Sussex was led by six Danish rosewood dining chairs designed by Niels Otto Moller for JL Moller.

Archibald Knox (1864-1933) is known today as the genius behind the Cymric and Tudric ranges sold by Liberty & Co in the early 20th century.

If Knox is best known today for his work with Liberty & Co, in his own time on the Isle of Man he was better recognised as an art teacher and for his study of the local Celtic crosses and standing stones.

The few surviving pieces of furniture designed by Archibald Knox were mainly produced at the Sunnyside Workshops in Douglas, founded by Knox with his friend and patron Wilson James Ashburner in 1899.

When Anthony Bernbaum curated the exhibition Archibald Knox, Beauty and Modernity, a Designer Ahead of his Time at the Olympia International Art & Antiques Fair in 2014, he was working in investment banking.

A closer look at the post-war appreciation of the great designer including exhibitions and auction landmarks

Local tourist bodies believe that Knox can do for the Isle of Man what Mackintosh has done for Glasgow.

Dr Stephen Martin first encountered Archibald Knox in a New York bookstore in 1990.

The Art Deco design movement found a unique expression in Cotswolds School furniture - one that sought to blend clean lines with traditional English materials and craftsmanship.

Auctioneer and valuer Clive Stewart-Lockhart has written a new biography of one of British Art Deco’s foremost figures - his great aunt Mary Stewart Lockhart, better known as Betty Joel (1894-1985).

These two silver lots bear the mark of Henry George Murphy (1884-1939), whose Falcon Studio produced some of the finest English silver of the inter-war era.

Only a decade ago Carlton Ware designer Violet Elmer (1907-88) was a relative unknown compared with her contemporaries Clarice Cliff, Susie Cooper and Charlotte Rhead.

The London-based design company Isokon, which produced furniture by Wells Coates and Marcel Breuer, and Gerald Summers’ firm Makers of Simple Furniture both explored the radical possibilities of lamination.