For my new eclectic blog, one of the new categories as we put the blog together, will be a section where I wax lyrical about classic vintage pieces we all either grew up with or recognise.
First up, the 80s middle-class classic the antique old world map coffee table.
They were made in the 1980s. I’m sadly young enough to remember these being for sale in the furnishing retailers of the time. They were ever so trendy and considered to be a very smart addition to your home.
These are often credited as being made in the 60s by many vintage online retailers, but they simply were not, these are from the 1980s. Many are often also credited as being made of mahogany, but although the grain is similar to mahogany they are made of teak. It always staggers me how people have large online vintage shops and misdescribe, not intentionally, but because they clearly don’t know their product very well.
They are a campaign style because campaign furniture, which was prevalent in Victorian times, had the distinctive brass band that you can see in the top corner of the legs which was basically there to strengthen the military furniture on its rough travels over the globe, I presume that is why these bands have been augmented onto this furniture. The military campaigning is commensurate with the world maps and our once dominance.
Both decorative and practical with the glass surfaces. The brass edges gave the glass protection as well as suited the hues of the artwork aesthetically.
The legs are made of teak which was stained. The stretchers are thick tough board. This was the era of the 80s, when black ash furniture ruled with a return to darker woods.
The prints are simply imposed on a thick board surface with the glass covering them.
As I said, these used to be in all the mainstream stores, of course generally sitting with the globe drinks cabinets!
It is funny how they became so popular as old maps have never been a huge hit, but like anything that becomes fashionable, they create a niche for themselves.
I do not practice the art of cartography so I can tell you very little about the actual maps suffice it to say the maps are round and the earliest maps from the 5th and 6th centuries are maps of a flat world so they’re certainly dated after that!
I think interestingly, as houses have got smaller over the decades people simply do not have the room for nest of tables and they are now very much out of fashion and you don’t see them as much as nests anymore. They are routinely broken up and dotted around the house generally with the main table chucked away as it would have been the table that has taken the battering and all the water and coffee marks over the years.
A nest, but obviously can be spread around your house for a variety of uses bedside, coffee, plant stands, occasional, side, hi-fi tv stand. Around markets and fairs, you often see single and double tables as the other tables have wobbled to redundancy and the glass gets broken.
I bought them last Sunday. What a superb set they are. I bought them at Ford Market from Dave, one of the house clearance guys. I buy quite a lot of stuff from him, and he’d just cleared a house in Rottingdean near Brighton, which as he said was a bit like a museum. The family had lived there for generations and as it was a big house did buy nice furniture and also clearly held onto it for a long time. Certainly, the later generations that inhabited the house didn’t see fit to upgrade their furniture and Dave has retrieved some fantastic pieces.
Like a lot of fashionable furniture in any decade, some manufacturers built it well and others built it cheaply these are certainly from the higher end of the market as I’ve come across loads of these before and so many of them are just completely wobbly but these are on the whole held up very well.
I paid good money for these because as Dave quite rightly pointed out they are very well preserved for their age. I pointed out, and this is a condition report, that there are some surface marks on the legs and the colours of the wood are not completely uniform. This is because a few parts of the tables were obviously very much exposed to direct sunlight and they had faded a little. The central table print appears to undulate a little and sadly someone who’s had an accident and there is a watermark to the small table where the water has seeped underneath the brass and onto the print.
So not perfect but I have to say they are very sturdy.
I remember in the 80s popping around my mate’s houses and their parents’ globe coffee tables. In that, they were available in the local furnishing shops and you took them for granted as a thing of the time, a bit naff, so it is funny forty years on buying them as vintage pieces to sell on, moving from the genre of naff to kitsch and trendy.
The Rights of Fans. 