Antique Furniture Can Be
A Lucrative Investment

February 9, 2005 -- Like most people, Janice Stanton often pores over her investments while sitting at her dining-room table. In Ms. Stanton's case, though, the investment is the table.

Three years ago, the Manhattan real-estate executive wanted a dining room that coordinated with her modern-art collection, so she picked a bleached-walnut table and eight black lacquered chairs by 1950s Italian designer Gio Ponti. She paid $16,000 -- and now the pieces would sell for nearly twice that much. "The fact that there's any return is shocking to me," she says.

Stocks, bonds and... used furniture? A little-noticed corner of the art market is drawing more interest lately, with prices of many chairs, tables and sofas outpacing the stock averages since 1990. The market includes much more than Chippendale desks and Louis XIV chairs. Prices for Danish designer Arne Jacobsen's 1960's "egg" chairs -- Heather Locklear sat in one in a 1990s hair-color ad -- have tripled in the past decade, to about $3,500. Last month, a pair of 1970 stainless-steel chairs by French designer Maria Pergay broke an auction record for the designer, selling for $79,200, about nine times the presale estimate. There's even a market in wall clocks: Some by midcentury designer George Nelson are changing hands for as much as $3,000, up from $400 a decade ago. (They look like sunflowers or atom diagrams.)

For would-be investors, it's a tempting market: At Christie's last year, five 1951 beech-frame chairs by Hans Wegner sold for $850 -- less than five wood Plantation chairs cost at Crate and Barrel. But it's also tricky: It can be tough to tell artist originals from reproductions, and this is an investment that can depreciate in seconds. (Watch that coffee cup.) Prices for some works may be overvalued already, some experts say. "Prices are getting out of line for certain lesser pieces," says Reed Krakoff, a long-time collector of 20th-century design and president of accessories firm Coach.

Hans Wegner's circa-1960 'Ox' armchair recently sold for $15,535.

In the past decade, we found, most designers' prices climbed considerably. Among the superstars: French Art Deco designer Jacques-Emile Ruhlmann is becoming something of the van Gogh of furniture, with a threefold rise in price for some pieces in the past 10 years. Many of the biggest names, though, are no longer bargains. While Steven Spielberg may have been collecting George Nakashima pieces for years, some experts suggest the $18,500 the designer's slice-of-wood tables are averaging now may be as high as they'll go for awhile.

Watch the Egg

So where's the market heading now? To get an idea of which designers have legs and which may have run out of steam, we consulted auctioneers, authors and gallery owners to assign each artist a Buy, Sell or Hold rating. A "sell" doesn't mean the designer's work is poor, of course, but that interest now may be near a peak. The average sale price for Jacobsen's chairs, for example, has more than doubled in the past decade, to $1,177, but our experts say the upside for his works is limited because he had a relatively narrow range of styles. (He's also known for "swan" and "ant" chairs.)

Buy: Charles Rennie Mackintosh

Many collectors are tempted by the chance to find a bargain. A few years ago, Michael Hughes paid $10 for a teak jewelry cabinet at a yard sale, after he suspected it was the work of an important '50s designer. It turned out to be a Nelson -- and currently, pieces similar to the one he and his wife, Elizabeth, bought sell for $10,000 or more. The find encouraged the couple to look at their living room as a potential profit center. "Some people buy stocks and bonds," says Mr. Hughes, a 32-year-old marketing manager who lives in suburban Washington, D.C. "We buy furniture."

Our survey suggests that it pays for would-be collectors to get the furniture-world's version of "inside information." One sign that particular furniture designers may be set to rise: Prominent art dealers are showing their works. New York-based art dealer Larry Gagosian -- better known, perhaps, for his Andy Warhol shows -- held an exhibition of French post-war designer Jean Prouve in the spring of 2004. After the show started, a set of Prouve porthole doors sold for $254,000. Last month at Sotheby's, a similar pair of doors sold for $680,000.

Hold: George Nelson

The furniture market long operated independently from the more volatile and more faddish art market. For decades, the secondary market for furniture was dominated by colonial furniture -- the kind of tea tables Benjamin Franklin might have owned. But as prices for the very best early furniture increasingly went over $1 million, collectors began to look to 20th-century furniture designers, snapping up works by Gustav Stickley and Frank Lloyd Wright. The rising tide lifted prices for works from the 1950s and after, with the boom spreading recently to designers whose works span just the past 30 years.

At the same time, valuing furniture has become much more difficult. Well into the 1930s and 1940s, designers made mostly one-of-a-kind pieces, but mass production became the norm after World War II. Collectors of postwar works generally seek out examples that were among the earliest ones produced, or were commissioned for specific projects, on the theory that they were the closest to the artist's original vision.

Couture Lines

Muddying the waters further: Some design companies have reissued works by prominent designers years after initial production ended. These works have limited collectible value. And some of today's contemporary designers operate like their fashion counterparts, issuing a "couture" line of pricey, limited-edition or one-of-a-kind works, and also license their names and designs to manufacturers. Israeli-born designer Ron Arad's chairs can sell for $42,000 at auction, for example, but his plastic stackable ones sell for about $300 in stores.

Sell: George Nakashima

Have collectors already missed the boat on price appreciation? Not necessarily. Experts point to Italian designers as underpriced versus their French counterparts. And the market is so hot that "some of the contemporary designers are becoming almost immediately collectible" says Richard Wright, owner of Wright, an auction house in Chicago that specializes in 20th-century furniture. There's no guarantee, he cautions, that prices for this recent work will keep climbing.

But in the end, it's still furniture, and owners have to decide whether to save it, or sit on it. Christopher Fillichio of Boca Raton, Fla., sold an Eames' storage unit a few years ago for $20,000, he says, more than twice his purchase price. But sometimes he has sold for more prosaic reasons. The owner of a prefab-home community had a rare "cloud form" sofa by Isamu Noguchi, but every time a friend would try to sit in it, Mr. Fillichio would wince. A couple of years ago, he sold it at auction for $250,000, and the 42-year-old bought a new couch for his family to replace the Noguchi. "I miss it terribly," he says. "But I had no place to sit."

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