THE CAVENDER DIARY

I love to shop resale, thrift, junk…whatever you call it. Just don’t call it “antiquing”….Bleck!

Fact. Things that are used, worn-in, and previously loved by someone else have way more character than anything Pottery Barn massed produced in India.

I enjoy the thrill of hunting for the unknown. If you go looking for anything specific……..you Will be disappointed. It just doesn’t work that way. You find what you find.

This idea is new to Jamie.  If he needs a chair, he goes to a chair store, and he buys a chair. While I search, I negociate……and I hunt.

It was while hunting the other weekend that we came across this mid-century blond double dresser. We weren’t actually looking for a dresser, but there one was.

We don’t necessarily need a new dresser….but I have toyed with replacing the 2 fiberboard pieces in the guest room for the last year or so. They are just Ikea (shocker, we shop there way too much) that Jamie bought the first week we were in the house. Because we needed a dresser and went to the dresser store and bought one. They are a little too contemporary for me, pale “wood-ish material” surrounding black drawers with cut-outs for handles. They serve their purpose of holding sweaters. That’s all. No real attachment to those things what-so-ever.

But this dresser?

It has character.

It has a story.

It had been loved.

It had also been reduced in price to about a third of what I would expect a genuine Heywood-Wakefield piece to sell for on Craig’s List. It couldn’t possibly be Heywood-Wakefield…Could it?

I googled “Heywood Wakefield Dresser” on my phone, and found this image.

Heywood-Wakefield Encore Double Dresser

It looked exactly like the dresser I was standing next to. But the one online was priced much higher and looked way rougher than the piece in front of me. WAAAAYYYYY Rougher.

Maybe this could work for us. But what were his dimensions? I pulled out a dollar bill (great tip here because they are about 6 inches long, so 2 dollars = 1 foot) and measured almost 10 bills across and not quite 4 bills deep. That’s about 5 X 2 on top…….pretty much the same size as the 2 we I needed wanted to replace.

Still a little iffy on the price. So home to think about whether we really needed it or not…..I think about purchases a little bit too long sometimes. “The time to buy an antique is when you see it.”

That’s why Jamie called me at work the next day to tell me that he had called the shop and asked if they could do any better on the price…..and they could. Substantially better.

How could we say no?

We split the cost, pretty fair since we will each take half of the drawers.

Jamie and our friend Jimmy picked it up this week.  They said that it was heavy.

Well, yeah. It’s made out of wood, birch actually, and not pressed fiberboard like Ikea.

The Heywood-Wakefield furniture company began making the “modern” line of furniture in the 1930’s based on French deco designs. Before that point they were mostly known for wicker furniture and stadium, bus and classroom seating. The 2 most popular stains in the Modern line were Champaign (a sort of pinkish hue) and Wheat (the blond color you see above). Because the company marking on a piece was usually a piece of paper glued to the back, over the years they fell off , leaving most pieces unverifiable. Almost all of the company records had been lost by the 1970’s.

Our piece is the right shape and color (probably restained at some point because the stain does not look 50+ years). It doesn’t have a third leg in the middle, like most of the examples I found online. There are no arrow marks on the back where a mirror would have been attached like the example below, or a stamp denoting the stain color. See where it say’s “Wheat” upper left corner? Ours doesn’t.

No more waiting,

Here’s our new (possibly pedigreed) blond dresser in the guest room…..where the Ikea pieces used to sit.

And the top, which will usually be covered in piles of clean laundry…

So, Is it or isn’t it?

Doesn’t matter one bit to us….We love it either way.