One was the dining room buffet for a measly $20 which has been mentioned before and is still awaiting stripping and restoration.
The other was a somewhat interesting little drawer unit with a really bad blue paint job for $5. We talked about repainting it and storing takeout menus inside, but never really got around to it. So when we moved into our current house, it ended up hanging out in the corner of the garage.
Before tackling the buffet, which I prize for its modern lines and sweet hardware, I wanted to test out some stripping methods on the little chest of drawers. So on Saturday, I penned the dog up in the neighboring room so that he'd only get the whiff of fumes rather than actually ingesting mounds of peeled paint. I applied a coat of chemical stripper, donned my sensible rubber blue gloves, and went medieval on its a**.
Only after I got past the first layer did I clear enough to see that there was a fine, and I mean "sexy" FINE walnut wood veneer underneath. I began to take more care. Once I realized that I might be dealing with a nicer piece of furniture than I'd previously expected, I searched the drawers and found this label.
A little googling and we have a winner. Gilbert Rohde was a famous industrial designer and furniture craftsman in the 1930s who single handedly, by some accounts, steered the Herman Miller Furniture company aesthetic towards modernism and minimalist design. He has pieces in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others, and his pristine pieces go for a lot on ebay.
I'm under no misconception that I could buffer my retirement account or even buy the aforementioned skill saw with this piece. I fully imagine that I would take it to an antique dealer, much like on that Antiques Roadshow thing on PBS, and they would tell me "If only you had left the paint on, or if you hadn't kept it in your basement for a year, or let the dog pee on it that one time, it would be worth $10,512."But it will be nice to have in the house once I clean it up a bit more. I've contacted the Herman Miller company as well as an evidently well-informed guy on flickr. (He also has a great showcase of Rohde design photos. He's an avid collector.) Hopefully they'll help me with an identification of the piece this week.
And the satisfaction that I get from knowing its not being used to store someone's crack pipes or some UPenn student's maxed out credit card collection is more than enough for me. A pile of take out menus will be a welcome inhabitant.
