Transcript
Speaker: Hello, welcome to Curious Objects brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
Speaker: I'm Ben Miller.
Speaker: My guests today are Pippa Biddle and Ben Davidson.
Speaker: It's nice to have another Ben on the podcast.
Speaker: Do again.
Speaker: And together they own and operate Quintner Antiques in Germantown, New York.
Speaker: They also write a regular column for the magazine Antiques called Object Lesson, which I highly recommend.
Speaker: And they wear and have worn a variety of different hats, which we'll get into as the conversation goes on.
Speaker: But I wanted to just start right off the bat asking you about Quintner Antiques.
Speaker: This is, after all, a podcast about antiques.
Speaker: And I think listeners would be interested to hear a little bit about the nature of the shop.
Speaker: What is it?
Speaker: What do you buy and sell?
Speaker: And then later on, we'll get into a bit of the history behind it and how you got into the business.
Speaker: But what would be a typical sort of piece that you would buy and sell at Quintner?
Speaker: Yeah, so what we buy and sell at Quintner has changed a little bit actually over the pandemic because we decided to close our retail store and move our store entirely online.
Speaker: We still do in-person restoration and repair work, but it's just sort of adjusting to this new normal.
Speaker: So we mostly focus on smalls, small decorative objects, and we try to hit a pretty approachable price point.
Speaker: So those are two things that size and what we'd be able to sell it for that we sort of take into every item that we look at.
Speaker: But a big thing for us, both of us are quite passionate about design.
Speaker: sort of American colonial style, pieces that speak to that style, and really the style of the Hudson Valley.
Speaker: We're not mid-century modern people.
Speaker: You don't see a lot of lightly stained wood.
Speaker: Or chrome.
Speaker: Or chrome.
Speaker: Yeah, you don't see a lot of chrome.
Speaker: We really like painted boxes, so we obsess a little over painted boxes.
Speaker: But a lot of it's a passion project, just what we see being beautiful and being able to be brought into someone's home in a way that is truly additive.
Speaker: to the environment they live within that brings in warmth, which I know is really unspecific, but does allow us to really take a broad vision when we go to auction or when we go to buy.
Speaker: We're able to look without having to have laser focus and really think about what is beautiful and what fits in a home and what makes us feel good.
Speaker: It's interesting.
Speaker: I mean, if I heard what you had just said without any context, without having talked to you before, without having read your articles in the magazine Antiques and that sort of thing, I might be sort of dismissive.
Speaker: I might think, oh, gosh, well, you know, it sounds like you're not really a specialist.
Speaker: You don't are just sort of
Speaker: buying cute things and probably don't know a whole lot about the history and so on.
Speaker: Maybe that's just because I'm pretentious.
Speaker: But you do.
Speaker: I mean, you both are quite deeply knowledgeable about really a wide variety of American colonial forms and
Speaker: other types of objects.
Speaker: So, you know, most of the dealers that I think of who are who really have specialized knowledge about decorative arts, they run businesses that are oriented toward the most expensive objects, the highest end pieces, and they tend to specialize in a fairly narrow area.
Speaker: But that's not the case for you.
Speaker: So how does that work?
Speaker: And how did that come about?
Speaker: I think, let Ben take half of that.
Speaker: I think that half of it is how we entered the business and sort of the collection we started with.
Speaker: Half of it is that we are absolutely, I'll completely embrace materialistic, pretentious individuals when it comes to this field and for our own private collections.
Speaker: But something that we really committed to day one is that we are a small town business.
Speaker: And we want any individual in the town that we live in, in Germantown, to feel comfortable coming in and getting something from us, whether they are a set decorator buying for Warner Brothers or they are a man getting an anniversary gift for his wife.
Speaker: We want to have something they can come in and find.
Speaker: I think that the Hudson Valley is awash with very, very talented dealers who are at the very high end of the market.
Speaker: We're just south of Hudson, which has the iconic Warren Street.
Speaker: I don't know if there's really a need right here for someone else to come in and sell someone a $10,000 dresser.
Speaker: But there is a need to build a connection between people who do not have that budget and beautiful, beautiful things that are not new.
Speaker: And that's something that we take quite personally.
Speaker: But Ben can speak to really the inventory that we started with and how we started.
Speaker: Yeah, and beyond, I mean, before, like, I absolutely can talk about that as it was my collection that we started with, that we were very quickly trying to sell off.
Speaker: But in a larger sense, I...
Speaker: We both grew up in households that had a great many antiques, but in the style of it was a couple of generations of collectors who each had their own kind of curio cabinet of things and what they were interested in.
Speaker: And then they passed it all on to a kid who absolutely hated it, but kept it around and then added their things so that they felt better with it.
Speaker: And so we both come from backgrounds and lives where we weren't, it never had the kind of iconoclasm of coming in and cleaning it for a particular style.
Speaker: So we came from...
Speaker: kind of canvases that were already stained with a generalist tinge where it was more that, oh, these two things complement each other even if they're not from the same maker or from the same era or even styles that speak to each other.
Speaker: They just, together, they are very beautiful.
Speaker: But beyond that, I also, one...
Speaker: I can only speak for myself, but when I came into an age where I was reflecting on kind of why I liked some things and not others, I just kind of recoiled to a degree from the siloing of a specialization.
Speaker: and an over deep focus on one aesthetic form or style, because I think that it's all too, it becomes a very, I mean, in the same way that a lot of education today is it's very specialized, very hyper focused, and then no one can see outside of their field.
Speaker: And, um, and so when I started into restoration, we'll probably get into this later, but I started in, um, restoring an arts and crafts house outside of Philadelphia that was built and, or designed and built by William Price, who was an arts and crafts architect, but he was not, and quite consciously not a Frank Lloyd Wright.
Speaker: Or a, you know, or any of the others who, or a Stickley who, you know, made their own genre and then built in that genre.
Speaker: And if you bought a Frank Lloyd Wright house, you got Frank Lloyd Wright's furniture.
Speaker: If you bought a Stickley set, like, then they wanted to sell you the next piece of Stickley.
Speaker: Well, Price was very much, he started in the Gothic and built kind of this Gothic revival style.
Speaker: And then he was hired to design a casino and he laughed at them.
Speaker: He was like, are you insane?
Speaker: I am the opposite of anyone you want designing a casino.
Speaker: And he built a casino that he very consciously and explicitly said,
Speaker: It will be a palace to the worst vices of mankind.
Speaker: And it was the old Blenheim casino in Atlantic City.
Speaker: And it's been demolished.
Speaker: But if you see pictures of it, it is a remarkably, consciously, meticulously hideous building.
Speaker: I love that self-awareness.
Speaker: decadent in a way that is astonishing.
Speaker: And he did a number, he was like, a building's exterior should reflect what is done within it.
Speaker: Why do we build banks that look like palaces?
Speaker: We should build banks that look like moneylenders' dens in every folktale.
Speaker: It should look like a place that you do not want to go.
Speaker: And this is obviously around the time of stock market crash and...
Speaker: So it reflected that.
Speaker: But his whole point was, don't build for a style.
Speaker: Build the people that you're building for.
Speaker: Design for the people who are going to live in it.
Speaker: And so when he designed these homes, he knew what the couple or what the family owned.
Speaker: So they had a bunch of the house that I was restoring.
Speaker: They owned a bunch of Federalist antiques and and a couple of Victorian pieces and a bit of, you know, kind of early craftsman style, a bit of Spanish colonial.
Speaker: And he just built a house that was simple and reflective of that with, you know, the intention that their lives would fit in it.
Speaker: And I think that that has always influenced our collecting where it's really, it all could go together.
Speaker: Even if it wasn't all meant to go together.
Speaker: Yeah, I think that it's building a home.
Speaker: I mean, my family's lived in the same house for over 250 years.
Speaker: And the house has never been refurnished.
Speaker: So we've added to it.
Speaker: It's in Dover, Delaware.
Speaker: It's called the Ridgely House.
Speaker: It's where my mom grew up.
Speaker: It's where my grandfather grew up.
Speaker: It's where every generation before that grew up.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: It's a really important house historically to American history and the history of the state of Delaware.
Speaker: But it's a family home.
Speaker: And so I grew up where you would open up the dresser where you put your clothes.
Speaker: And there's a note there that my grandmother wrote in the 80s that was to help the tour guide who would show the house every couple months to guests to advise them on the history of the bedroom set.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: And that was just a normal thing to see.
Speaker: And so you see this accumulation and this collection and these pieces that if you were to go into any sort of high end shop, they'd never say to put together.
Speaker: But I know they go together because I live with them together.
Speaker: And that's something that we really try to work with our clients on is envisioning how their spaces can evolve to reflect them.
Speaker: I think that start to finish design can be an absolutely beautiful thing.
Speaker: I mean, look at the pages of Architectural Digest, like seeing people who take blank plots of land and turn them into these really beautiful,
Speaker: masterpieces of obsession is amazing.
Speaker: But there's also another type of obsession.
Speaker: It takes a much longer time and that's accumulation and it's collection.
Speaker: Which is how most of us inevitably live our lives.
Speaker: It's how most people live their lives and it's so much more approachable and it's so much more warm and it allows room for eccentricity and I mean both Ben and I were very young.
Speaker: I'm 28.
Speaker: He's 29.
Speaker: We've both had a variety of
Speaker: careers and directions in life prior to getting into this business that sort of belie our age.
Speaker: And if we were told that we had to focus on one thing for the rest of our lives because that's the thing we picked when we were 28, that'd be miserable to me.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, we have.
Speaker: It's just antiques and not Dunlap furniture from one generation of makers.
Speaker: That is sort of the joy of us writing the Objects Lessons column.
Speaker: And I feel like I sort of conned Greg, the editor-in-chief, into letting us do it because he came into the store one day.
Speaker: And I, as I said, work as a writer and I pitched him.
Speaker: I said, hey, I heard that you're now like the head honcho in charge.
Speaker: I want to write this thing and I want to write it with Ben.
Speaker: And it's our excuse to just explore something we don't know much about or are obsessed about and think someone else should be obsessed about.
Speaker: It allows us to wear the badge of generalist quite proudly and to convince people who are far above our rank in this industry to talk to us for hours on end, which is an amazing opportunity.
Speaker: Well, you made a good impression on Greg.
Speaker: I mean, he even published an editor's note about his meeting you and talking with you.
Speaker: That was the first time I had heard about you.
Speaker: So I first time I'd heard about her and we were married.
Speaker: We weren't even married yet.
Speaker: We weren't married yet.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Sorry.
Speaker: OK, so I want to I want to sort of ground us a little bit here because we could talk all day, but there is actually a curious object that is the focal point of our conversation today, ostensibly.
Speaker: And I think it will reveal a little bit about your mentality and your approach to this business.
Speaker: And there's a great story behind it.
Speaker: So the Curious Object is actually a box that didn't come from some fancy Christie's or Sotheby's sale.
Speaker: You've told me that you basically found it on the riverside.
Speaker: So tell me about discovering this box and what you learned about it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So maybe Ben can give a little description of it first so people can imagine it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And we will have pictures on magazineheadteeth.com.
Speaker: But for our listeners, yeah.
Speaker: I mean, how big is it?
Speaker: I just was saying, I don't have the measurements because I don't
Speaker: What's funny is it's actually about 12 feet away from us right now, but it's wrapped in like 15 layers of bubble wrap in the middle of a move.
Speaker: The size of a basketball?
Speaker: A basketball would just barely fit in it.
Speaker: No, no, no, no, I'm sorry.
Speaker: A basketball would fit in the fully wrapped package that it's in currently.
Speaker: A basketball would just, the inner core of a basketball, if you turn a basketball into a square, like if you cut the roundness out of a basketball, it would fit.
Speaker: It's probably, how large is that?
Speaker: Well, now I feel like Kevin's going to judge me for not knowing the size of the basketball.
Speaker: Well, we're past the basketball, but how large are my fingers?
Speaker: I'd say it's 10 inches square.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's about, yes, I would say it's 10 inches.
Speaker: It took us a while to get around to that, but 10 inches.
Speaker: I could take that again if you'd like.
Speaker: I would say that it's about 10 inches across and maybe 12 inches tall.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it's a wooden box, but it has iron banding.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: On corners and or edging and and corners.
Speaker: So what caught your eye about it?
Speaker: Do you want to tell the story?
Speaker: Well, yeah.
Speaker: So what really I was skeptical.
Speaker: Should we just what caught our eye about it and then tell the story next?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Why don't you say why you why you decided to bid on it?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: And then I'll tell you why I was miserable the entire time.
Speaker: There you go.
Speaker: So when we first saw it, I thought that the iron looked hand-forged or competently faked, if it was a fake.
Speaker: And it was a curious size, but I thought that the finishing hit was crazy, and it seemed an inelegant box to fake if someone were faking.
Speaker: But too kind of well done to be a low quality fake if it were faked.
Speaker: So I thought that it was something that was striking in kind of its understatedness.
Speaker: Yeah, and there wasn't really a description to guide us.
Speaker: I mean, we were sitting in folding chairs in an unheated warehouse.
Speaker: Warehouse itself is a generous term.
Speaker: In the middle of winter, we remember it as being one of the first things that came up for auction.
Speaker: But I actually think, based on the fact I remember not being able to feel my fingers anymore, that it was a bit, it was after like a parade of G.I.
Speaker: Joe figurines and Barbies.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: And we were pretty frustrated because we were sort of scared that nothing we were interested in would come up.
Speaker: It's a pretty free form auction format.
Speaker: And we were the youngest people there by approximately two centuries.
Speaker: And it was also my first time ever at an auction like this and our first time together at an auction.
Speaker: And I knew that Ben at that point had a really strong affliction called shopping.
Speaker: And he really liked buying things.
Speaker: And so I sort of went into, yeah, antiques.
Speaker: Things is not fair.
Speaker: Antiques and high-value antiques.
Speaker: He's very good at spotting things.
Speaker: It's dangerous.
Speaker: But I sort of went in feeling like I was going to have to hold him back because I have the opposite affliction, which is that I am consistently terrified that I'm broke despite the fact it's never happened.
Speaker: Um, and this box came up for auction and the description that was said by the auctioneer was, this is a kind of nice box, locked, no key, may have a thousand dollars in it, but probably not.
Speaker: Feels pretty empty.
Speaker: Feels pretty.
Speaker: It's a nice box.
Speaker: Let's start the bidding at $50.
Speaker: Yeah, so they started the bidding and then no one bid and it went, they lowered the price.
Speaker: No one bid, they lowered the price.
Speaker: Ben shoots his hand up.
Speaker: So this was a Dutch auction.
Speaker: going backwards it's not supposed to be it's not and if i may for that it was just very cold that day it was the first item which is why i was like i'll be kind and at least let this one sell because it seems to be the first item of the day and you know uh and so i i i bet i believe i mean that's
Speaker: We have slightly divergent memories, but either way, he ended up winning it for about $25.
Speaker: We just stashed it underneath our chairs.
Speaker: The auction went on.
Speaker: We ended up with a van full of stuff.
Speaker: We spent an eye-watering sum that day of about $300.
Speaker: And I felt quite... Yeah, I was just... I was like, how did we possibly spend that much?
Speaker: Now I laugh, obviously, because that is...
Speaker: That is so chump change compared to what happens now.
Speaker: But we ended up with this box, and I really sort of forgot it existed.
Speaker: Perhaps I hoped that it hadn't happened until Ben took it out to his workshop and came back into the house about an hour later, and he said, one, I got it open, and guess what?
Speaker: There's keys inside.
Speaker: So that's super helpful.
Speaker: So now it is a box with keys, and there's also a note.
Speaker: And what did the note say?
Speaker: So the note said, this is the worst framing of that.
Speaker: The note said, General Peter Gansford used box on Mohawk River in expedition against Indians, great grandfather of William L. Martin.
Speaker: And then on the back, it was dated.
Speaker: November 25th, 1943.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: Okay, so let's unpack that.
Speaker: So 1943, somebody wrote this note, presumably about their great grandfather.
Speaker: And this is a fellow named Peter Gansford.
Speaker: Now, did you already know who Peter Gansford was?
Speaker: I did not.
Speaker: I had no idea.
Speaker: Ben knew immediately.
Speaker: I knew Peter Gansford as Colonel Gansford of the Battle of Fort Stanwix, of the Saratoga campaign in 1777.
Speaker: I'm sure listeners are all familiar with the Saratoga campaign, but maybe just to refresh our memories, what was that all about?
Speaker: The Saratoga campaign was when Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne or... All right, I'll stop, Pippa.
Speaker: No, I love this.
Speaker: I'm always impressed, so go for it.
Speaker: Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne led his campaign.
Speaker: troops on a campaign down ostensibly from canada through new york to hopefully sever the rebellious colonies in half um so that they could take the northern colonies and where they because the british believed that the southern colonies were right with um tory sympathizers and so they said we'll cut them in half and then we'll deal with the rebels to the north
Speaker: And he was beaten at Saratoga by Benedict Arnold or rather by... No, I'll just... Yeah, I'll stump for Benedict Arnold in this early campaign by Benedict Arnold.
Speaker: He won the battle.
Speaker: And so as a part of that, the British had first advanced on a series of forts of Fort George, which was also under Gansford's command fell.
Speaker: They actually just retreated from it and then they took their stand at Stanwyck's where they withstood siege for about three weeks.
Speaker: and I'm looking at my notes to find there.
Speaker: So, oh, yeah, in defense of Fort Stanwyck's about three weeks, and then they were relieved by Benedict Arnold, and Gansford had, you know, been commended by Congress, and John Adams said, he's shown that a man can hold a fort, which I guess was high praise, but just sounds pretty, pretty blousy.
Speaker: It's like, that is accurate, John.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's what he did.
Speaker: But so that's... I knew Gansford from that campaign.
Speaker: I didn't know what the element on the Mohawk River was.
Speaker: And so it wasn't until later that I read about his being employed in the Sullivan Expedition, which was in 1779.
Speaker: And it's a pretty... It's a pretty...
Speaker: questionable campaign actually.
Speaker: I think that for as we as we can recognize now the way in which our country has treated native peoples throughout our history has left much to be desired.
Speaker: Um, and so it's interesting to now sort of have this box that was taken on, uh, based on the note, taken on an expedition that, uh,
Speaker: When it happened, the understanding of that expedition was one thing.
Speaker: When this note was written, the understanding that expedition was another.
Speaker: And now, today, in 2020, the understanding of that expedition is, yet again, sort of recontextualized.
Speaker: And to me, that's a really interesting piece of its history.
Speaker: Yeah, it's a great difficulty that the Iroquois Confederacy, which is part of the forces against which the Sullivan campaign was sent, were very powerful and very fearsome and quite very feared at the time.
Speaker: And so it means that
Speaker: There was a level of celebration even into the 1940s for someone who participated in a campaign like that.
Speaker: Whereas now, and in light of subsequent events, it takes on a very different cast.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We understand better.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But, but, oh, so, so back to the, to the box.
Speaker: So we, um, I did more reading on it, um, you know, kind of bragged about it as much as possible to, to immediate family.
Speaker: No one was as excited as we were.
Speaker: It was actually really upsetting.
Speaker: All of a sudden, I think we both realized that we decided to go into a, a line of work in which, uh, our entire life may be plagued by the feeling that no one quite understands.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: Some people were excited, but it was the equivalent of if we found $75 in a hotel safe.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: I was like, well, that's nice.
Speaker: Look at that.
Speaker: Isn't that lovely?
Speaker: And it's like, well, come on, it's a bit better.
Speaker: So tell me about how you felt.
Speaker: I mean, when you found this note, when you started connecting these dots, how did that make you feel?
Speaker: I immediately felt like all of my assumptions on it being a kind of nice box were completely justified.
Speaker: I mean...
Speaker: I think the first couple hours I was being reminded every 20 minutes that I should blindly trust Ben's vision and that $25 was a great deal and we could have paid five times as much.
Speaker: Obviously, it's now probably 500 times as much.
Speaker: And I've been totally, totally fine with it.
Speaker: But I think that for both of us, like so much of what we seek in antiques is context.
Speaker: is story.
Speaker: And as shop owners, especially when our retail store was open, the most common question that we get from people is, well, where is this from?
Speaker: What is this story?
Speaker: And the reality is that for so many of the items that pass through our hands, the best we can do is really a broad stroke sketch of what a story might be.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like where it could have originated.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And when a story falls into your lap,
Speaker: It's it's astonishing.
Speaker: And it.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And to be fair.
Speaker: So our next step, because really the the down the road feeling when things had kind of the jubilation had settled was, all right, well, we'd really better check to make sure that this isn't just fake.
Speaker: or that someone had written a note and then put it in, eventually round its way into a different box or something else.
Speaker: Yeah, or people get confused and forget their family histories.
Speaker: Yeah, or an embellished story that just, you know, someone had an old box and they're like, oh, let me tell you about this box, kid.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So we sought out the staff of Peebles Island, which is the state of New York's restoration and antiques maintenance hub, and
Speaker: And they don't do work on private pieces.
Speaker: They don't want anyone else to ask them if they will, because they get that all the time.
Speaker: Sorry listeners.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: And sorry us, honestly.
Speaker: It's more like, please, though?
Speaker: Just this one?
Speaker: But they were willing to meet about the piece and just give me their, you know, they could not assess it or appraise it for its value, but they were willing to give their professional opinion on kind of their thoughts on, you know, the authenticity of it.
Speaker: And it turned out, and that's all they told me when I got there, it turned out that they had a somewhat ulterior motive for being willing to see it, but they first looked at it and they kind of came to the conclusion they think that
Speaker: it is in fact from the 18th century it uh you know nothing about it is um is a tell against it like obviously the the provenance is um anecdotal because of the note but i believe the the comment in in their you know summation was like uh it's too random and uninteresting a piece to have likely been fake i'm like yeah all right it's too
Speaker: That is the salvation of so many stories of provenance.
Speaker: Well, if you were faking this, wouldn't you make it a lot better?
Speaker: Wouldn't you do this, but more interestingly, for a larger sum?
Speaker: So they believe that it's a personal medical chest that the general may have taken on campaign.
Speaker: And as it turns out, it is the only physical object to survive from the campaign on the Sullivan expedition.
Speaker: So there are no other hats or uniforms or anything that has made it down the centuries.
Speaker: And so when before COVID, we were discussing they're using it for an exhibition on New York State's whatever anniversary they're coming up on, which is now on hiatus just because of we don't know when.
Speaker: they'll be able to do it.
Speaker: But that was a very exciting and interesting and rewarding thing to learn that not only is it a piece of history that we were able to save, but it's the last bit of history from something that, you know, was particularly rewarding.
Speaker: Yeah, and I think one of our goals with it is to be able to loan it.
Speaker: We...
Speaker: don't want to use it, which most of the antiques that we choose to keep for ourselves, we use quite heavily.
Speaker: We don't have... Have you chosen to keep this one?
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, we'll be keeping it.
Speaker: We've never discussed selling it.
Speaker: What we have discussed is loaning it.
Speaker: So putting it on long-term loan, most likely to the state if they remain interested, because I think that the educational value of it
Speaker: is quite good.
Speaker: The ability to connect a material object to a event and a story is so important.
Speaker: And if it's one of the only material or the only material object that connects to this story, that's a really valuable thing.
Speaker: But I don't think either of us right now have come to terms with the idea of selling it.
Speaker: So we haven't even pursued that as an option.
Speaker: particularly when we learned that Gansford was the maternal grandfather of Herman Melville.
Speaker: I mean, I was just like, we can never sell it.
Speaker: It's worth too much.
Speaker: I mean, my God.
Speaker: I'm laughing.
Speaker: That is extremely cool.
Speaker: Unfortunately, that fact apparently is more important than almost any other fact of Peter Gansford.
Speaker: So finding a biography of him that doesn't just like then say, also, it was Herman Melville's grandfather.
Speaker: You're like, yeah, great.
Speaker: This is a little bit of a tangent, but I was talking with a colleague of mine recently about this notion of provenance and association with important historical figures and so on.
Speaker: And we deal largely in antique English silver.
Speaker: And so the provenance often relates to important dukes and earls and barons and that sort of thing.
Speaker: And my colleague made the point that
Speaker: You know, oftentimes the problem that we have with provenance is
Speaker: if it didn't belong to the Queen of England or to George Washington or Thomas Jefferson, who cares?
Speaker: And even people who played extremely significant historical roles, there is the value that the provenance adds to those objects versus the value that the provenance adds when it did come from Thomas Jefferson.
Speaker: It's almost as if the provenance may as well not be there.
Speaker: And Gansevert is one of these figures who, you know, I mean, if you look up his Wikipedia page, as I've done, there is a significant amount of information.
Speaker: He is a figure of some public and historical interest, you know, played an important role in the birth of the country.
Speaker: And yet, my guess is if you walk down the street, even in a Hudson Valley town, and polled people about their knowledge of Peter Gansevoort, you might be disappointed.
Speaker: I'm just going out on a limb there.
Speaker: Sorry, go ahead.
Speaker: It's the difficulty of as you grow more distant from major events.
Speaker: One of my favorite popular historians who also has a podcast, his name is Mike Duncan, has made the quip that in about another...
Speaker: 500 to a thousand years if the united states is still around this story will be that george washington single-handedly birthed the nation and that he was born from a cherry tree and that his teeth were wooden so he can prove it like the legend just grows and encompasses all other roles within major events such that by the time that it you know even to our day like you know who was peter gansford he was oh he was on the sullivan expedition what was the sullivan you know and it's
Speaker: Who were the Tories?
Speaker: They were in New York City.
Speaker: It just becomes this background noise that is distracting.
Speaker: But that's what makes it so interesting to have an object, right?
Speaker: As opposed to oral tradition or other kinds of preservation of history.
Speaker: Because the object gives you that physical focal point.
Speaker: That excuse for conversation almost.
Speaker: I mean, here we are talking about...
Speaker: General Gansevoort on a very popular and widely listened to podcast.
Speaker: Not to toot your own horn.
Speaker: I think that something, the reason I get so excited, despite if you'd asked me when we got the box who Peter Gansevoort was, I would have told you sounds like the name of a hotel.
Speaker: I come from a family where, for me, history has always been personal.
Speaker: On one side, it's the Biddle family, one of the oldest banking families in America.
Speaker: And growing up, I would take AP U.S. history tests and see my relatives in the political cartoons I was supposed to critique.
Speaker: On the other side of my family is one of the oldest Delaware families in our country, the Ridgelys.
Speaker: As I mentioned, we've lived in the same house since the 1760s.
Speaker: It was built in 1726.
Speaker: History for me has always been intensely personal.
Speaker: And I didn't really understand why until I got older and realized that other people didn't have things they could point to and say, that's my history.
Speaker: And I think that the beautiful thing about a material culture and when you have provenance and you have those stories is it gives more people that opportunity to point to things and say, oh, I can build a bridge between myself and that object.
Speaker: And when you build that bridge, you create a whole new field for understanding.
Speaker: And that's a really exciting thing.
Speaker: back with Pippa Biddle and Benjamin Davidson.
Speaker: Thank you for listening.
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Speaker: Much appreciated.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: So Ben, tell me about, so we've talked a little bit about sort of how Pippa's background and how your family history has primed you for a life invested and interested in antique objects.
Speaker: But Ben, you're coming to this from the angle of restoration, of craftsmanship.
Speaker: Tell me more about that.
Speaker: Well, I mean, I also grew up in a house full of antiques, not with the direct provenance of the Ridgelys.
Speaker: So there was a familiarity and comfortability that I think is pretty helpful in getting into this field.
Speaker: Um, just the number of people who have come into the shop and then like are afraid to touch anything.
Speaker: And we're like, oh, let me just open that for you.
Speaker: Like, nah, it's fine.
Speaker: Um, but, uh, but then, yeah, after college, I, I studied, um, medieval history and, um, constitutional development.
Speaker: which was useful in life.
Speaker: And so after graduating, I kind of jumped around in things that I could do and then had a wonderful opportunity fall upon me that...
Speaker: to be the live-in caretaker of the Thunderbird Lodge outside of Philadelphia that was built by the arts and crafts architect William Price.
Speaker: It was his first kind of ground up remodel.
Speaker: It was a stone dairy barn in an old mill town called Rose Valley that...
Speaker: He turned the old stone barn into a two-story studio space for this artist couple and then built the somewhat gothic-inspired, but really largely just American crafts, you know, kind of simple craftsman, contemporary, very...
Speaker: straightforward and traditional without really any kind of directly linkable elements that rambled off of the stone barn.
Speaker: It has an octagonal tower in the middle of it.
Speaker: It's a very beautiful home that had been in, it had been sold by the original couple that was built for towards the end of their lives to a family.
Speaker: And then it stayed in that family for the next
Speaker: um what 80 plus years um and so after they they sold it to the town's museum and which at that point didn't have a physical location and so the town's museum was the just beginning the process of removing everything that had been kind of added or done to the interiors over the hundred years so the museum uh purchased or
Speaker: The museum obtained the house, I think.
Speaker: And they were just starting the process of restoring it back to how it had originally been designed and built.
Speaker: And they were looking for a live-in caretaker.
Speaker: And so I was selected for that.
Speaker: It was supposed to be like a 10-year project where the rent was like $80 a month.
Speaker: It was really an amazing opportunity to... They were like, yeah, it's...
Speaker: It's basically 5,000 square feet of living space, then each of the studios was another 4,000 square feet.
Speaker: And so they were like, furnish it however you want.
Speaker: We won't be using the space for 10 years.
Speaker: And I was like, great, can do.
Speaker: And hence the eventual storage unit of antiques that we then had to sell off, because I did that.
Speaker: But then as they were bringing in tradespeople to start pulling walls that had been thrown up back and things like that, I just kind of popped in and was like, you know, can I watch how you do that?
Speaker: Or eventually, like, can I, you know, I think I can do this one myself.
Speaker: And so just kind of learned very, you know, kind of hands-on.
Speaker: It w as a very fun process.
Speaker: And
Speaker: engaging and then we were we finished the majority of the restoration work about eight years ahead of schedule.
Speaker: I thought that was great because you know I did a great job and yay.
Speaker: And instead, I had cut myself out of eight years of very low-rent mansion life.
Speaker: And so I kicked myself pretty quickly.
Speaker: But I then started doing interior restoration work for a number of landlords in West Philly.
Speaker: And then came back to New York as my parents had moved here.
Speaker: into a home that my grandmother had owned and they needed some help with handling restoration of these historic properties.
Speaker: And so I started working here and through the whole of the process, I kind of just tinkered more and more with furniture.
Speaker: and other kind of historic objects, mostly wood, a little bit of metal, a little bit of gilding, things like that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So let me ask, so as a craftsman, how does that change the way that you look at antiques?
Speaker: I mean, with the box, you instantly recognize that it was either handmade hand wrought iron or it was a very good fake.
Speaker: So that's a detail that stood out to you because you're familiar with the materials.
Speaker: How else does that affect the way that you approach the antiques business?
Speaker: There have been a lot.
Speaker: Well, the wonderful element is that we can kind of take objects that have really been pushed beyond the brink for most collectors and most buyers, especially at a middle range, like not at the highest tier.
Speaker: When people will...
Speaker: throw up their hands on the thing and say, like, oh, it would be great if, you know, so-and-so hadn't broken this drawer, if, you know, this stain weren't here, if it hadn't whatever, whatever, whatever.
Speaker: And we not only can do that work, but it means that we can bid on them for far lower, or we can pick them up and actually add value to them, which, you know,
Speaker: We get to punch above our weight a little bit.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Because we're able to purchase things that are at a price point because of sort of mistreatment, maltreatment, that otherwise would be completely inaccessible to us.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And Ben is very, very good at what he does and is able to bring them back to a state where they will never be...
Speaker: unrepaired pieces.
Speaker: They will never be sort of the pristine, perfect example of what something is, but they will be beautiful, beautiful pieces that are fully functional that deserve many more years in a home.
Speaker: We also don't, our goal is not, like we could restore them where, you know, we would fabricate new pieces and we would remove the old ones that were broken or damaged or altered and make it so that the repair was not
Speaker: would appear that it never occurred.
Speaker: I don't like that.
Speaker: I don't want to do that.
Speaker: If a client has a piece that they need, absolutely, obviously.
Speaker: But for our own one- Your goal isn't to deceive, in other words.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: I think that a
Speaker: A repair is part of that story.
Speaker: It is part of the piece.
Speaker: I think that's one of the fun things, because right now more than half of our business is restoration, repair work, furniture and lighting mostly.
Speaker: for clients.
Speaker: And so much of the fun of that process, at least for myself, seeing as I don't do any of the restoration work, so I just get the great joy of showing it off once it's done, is explaining to a client precisely what was done so that they can see where it was done, so that they can understand what went into it and the story that sort of has been added on to this piece through that process.
Speaker: And I think that a lot of what Ben does is truly an art form.
Speaker: I mean, using linen to bind cracks, these things that you don't.
Speaker: People, people don't.
Speaker: Obviously, people still do this.
Speaker: We do this.
Speaker: There are amazing people around the world who still do this type of work, but there are fewer and fewer of them.
Speaker: And typically it is priced at a point where it is a type of work that's fairly inaccessible to most people.
Speaker: And just like we approach our retail inventory with accessibility in the front of our minds, we approach the restoration or repair work we do with accessibility at the front of our minds.
Speaker: And to be able to offer...
Speaker: really beautiful work to our community at a price that may not be a bargain.
Speaker: It's an expensive process to fix things, but that's far more accessible than what is typically found.
Speaker: We're able to continue those stories.
Speaker: Yeah, the linen repair in particular, which is, it shows, but it's a nice way of like, if you have cracked drawers in a dresser, using a piece of linen with, that's kind of seeded into glue, like a hide glue or a yellow carpenter's glue will also work.
Speaker: It kind of knits the, like a gauze on a wound, like it helps the wood to knit.
Speaker: it's a like knit it's like surgical mash it works like surgical mash that's yeah that more than fascinating um but it was it was fun when we were actually at the Ridgely house and I opened um this a grandfather clock that's in one of the rooms um and inside there was this very bit like very you know
Speaker: You could see at a glance that it was this very long strip of linen where clearly the moisture in the room had caused the clock to split in its back panel.
Speaker: And someone had just, you know, used the same exact technique in the exact same way.
Speaker: Probably 150 years ago.
Speaker: Yeah, and I called Pip over and was like, look, see, see, it's attested.
Speaker: So you can see that it is in fact a correct repair.
Speaker: I can say with absolute certainty that room, the design of that room or the furniture, where each piece of furniture is in that room has not changed since the 1920s, as shown in American interiors coffee table books.
Speaker: And in the drawers of the piece.
Speaker: So like in one of the drawers, you'll open it and be like, this is this is like a very like, you know, a photo from the 30s of this shelf with the exact same objects in the exact same place.
Speaker: We should dust more.
Speaker: OK.
Speaker: But, you know, it's really interesting.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I think that's that's something that.
Speaker: Ben spends a lot of time researching and trying to gain a deeper understanding in because unfortunately, one of the struggles with being in this field is acquiring information.
Speaker: And it is figuring out how to learn as much as you can.
Speaker: And for him, for you, this a lot of this process has been learning by doing.
Speaker: Mm hmm.
Speaker: learning by researching and reading.
Speaker: And we maintain an ever-growing library of what I call reference books, but many of them are antique books that describe things like how to wire a multi-speed
Speaker: This one took me a long time.
Speaker: I'm not an electrician and we had someone who needed a multi-speed and I had like six books on like, you know, horsepower engines and early, you know, just like, so you want to wire your house.
Speaker: Well, first thing you've got to decide is gas or electric.
Speaker: And you're like, hmm, for the lighting?
Speaker: This is a very old book.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Very good.
Speaker: I think we'll go with electric, thanks.
Speaker: But it's cool because YouTube is useful for lots of things and we can find out how to do almost anything on YouTube.
Speaker: But there are some things that you do in fact need to find a 1910 manual for restoration that at the time was already talking about things that were old and use that as your guide.
Speaker: A lot of old timers have told me that they, and then, you know, which one tells you a lot about the editing process in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, that you could write that sentence and no one would be like, just cut this.
Speaker: People have told me.
Speaker: What's wrong with you?
Speaker: But, um, but also, you know, it's, it's, and it is a combination of, you know, I, I have, uh, far too many books on, you know, woodworking and on, you know, contemporary furniture makers who are describing their, you know, the processes that they know and the,
Speaker: and the more modern tricks or methods that they use.
Speaker: And it is a common, especially if you have to fabricate a piece on a timeline, that I don't have a workshop of apprentices who can do all of the prep and turn out pieces the way that the speed that would be possible if there were still
Speaker: journeymen around.
Speaker: One day.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, so we're pining about the past, but let's turn to the future because both of you have expressed a kind of optimism about the future that is really nice to hear.
Speaker: And that, to be honest, you don't always hear from antique steelers, particularly older generations of antique steelers these days.
Speaker: And I would just like to hear what your take is on what the future looks like for people who are interested in these well-crafted antique objects.
Speaker: Well, our view on that can come off somewhat harshly to...
Speaker: The real story is that we got into this after the bubble popped, like after the kind of the price ventures.
Speaker: The American furniture market sort of collapses.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: And so where what we hear is constantly,
Speaker: This is nothing like what it used to be.
Speaker: You know, like, I paid so much more for this.
Speaker: We used to see, like, I mean, we go to these country auctions where every third person is griping about how a certain folk art frame would have gone for $12,000, and now it's going for $120,000.
Speaker: But for us, we've always seen it at, if even $120,000, we've always seen it at $30,000, $40,000.
Speaker: And so...
Speaker: our entry point was such where we can't help but view it.
Speaker: It's like, well, you paid a lot for that then.
Speaker: That's a lot to have shelled out for a thing that our whole context is just a different bracket.
Speaker: So there's the market consideration, but then there's also you've talked about the excitement that you've seen from your clients who are not necessarily octogenarians.
Speaker: Yeah, I think one of the funny things when we first started Quitner was that we were hearing from a lot of people that young people don't like antiques, which at the time I was 26.
Speaker: The fact they were even saying that to me was a little bit funny.
Speaker: Because I'm like, well, you're disproving yourself by having your conversation with me.
Speaker: Exhibit A. That's an okay boomer moment.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Exhibit A, the two of us.
Speaker: But also, just through the...
Speaker: sort of survey that is our clientele, most of the people who we work with are under 50.
Speaker: I'd say half of them are under 40.
Speaker: Our market skews young, not old.
Speaker: And there's increasing enthusiasm.
Speaker: I think that one of the things that I find really exciting as someone who's both of us are quite passionate about environmentalism and sustainability is
Speaker: Antiques are the greenest furniture you can buy.
Speaker: They've already been made.
Speaker: You don't need to go buy sustainable wood new stuff.
Speaker: Go buy something old.
Speaker: Especially if it's near you.
Speaker: I want the antiques industry to do a Got Milk style industry-wide ad campaign of it's green, buy old.
Speaker: It is a bumper sticker already.
Speaker: Go green, buy antiques.
Speaker: It is?
Speaker: Well, I will have to get one of those bumper stickers because it is one of my favorite conversations with my peers.
Speaker: And we've seen that among people our age is that they're identifying that more and more.
Speaker: I think also that this sort of hotel aesthetic has gotten old.
Speaker: Having every room look the same and having every space feel sterile is getting old to people.
Speaker: They want to feel comfortable.
Speaker: They want to feel at home and they want to feel warm.
Speaker: And I think that...
Speaker: One of the things I love seeing is more and more people who are attracted to wood where you can actually see the grain because it hasn't painted over 15 times.
Speaker: And just they want to feel grounded to something.
Speaker: And antiques provide that grounding.
Speaker: And so for us, it's just been it's been sort of like...
Speaker: operating in a, sometimes it feels like we're operating in a parallel universe because we're hearing from people all the time that this market is dying and no one's going into it and there's no money to be made and yet we're in it and young people are shopping with us and we're making money.
Speaker: It's the difficulty of, on the one hand, a lot of it is market cycles, where wood furniture showing the grain is we are seeing people be more and more open to it, and it is coming back.
Speaker: The reality is that in our lifetime, it will also go out again.
Speaker: If it does come back in its full...
Speaker: It will go out again because people will have a bunch of it and then they'll no longer want it because they'll see something else.
Speaker: Or their kids want it.
Speaker: Yeah, and that will keep happening.
Speaker: What's a more profound shift from my view is that the reason...
Speaker: Young people, from what I've seen, are attracted to these antiques.
Speaker: It's very different from the reason that their grandparents or their parents were, which is instead of it being about its antiquity or about its story or about where it came from or prominence.
Speaker: It's far more about its rep-re-ability, that they can repair it, that it can be maintained, it will not fall apart after the third move to a third new apartment.
Speaker: You can get the thing that you love and keep it.
Speaker: It will survive, the move or the breakup or whatever it is.
Speaker: It's not self-obsolescent.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's not composite.
Speaker: It's not a poured material that doesn't... Like, Ikea's furniture is fine if you never move it again.
Speaker: Like, if you set it up and it stays in one place forever, yeah, it's fine.
Speaker: Like, it will be fine.
Speaker: Provided there's no flood or something, it's fine.
Speaker: But as soon as you move it, it's destroyed.
Speaker: And, and that, that calculation is really easy to make when you've gotten your fifth or sixth, you know, fake kitchen island.
Speaker: And then you're like, why don't we just get one actually out of wood?
Speaker: Like, oh my God, every time we just keep getting things that fall apart.
Speaker: Which is, from my perspective, that's why you see the price point staying lower.
Speaker: It's not spiking right back up because people don't care that it was made in this town in Massachusetts in this point in time.
Speaker: They care that they have it and they can fix it and it will stick around, which is just a very different draw.
Speaker: And I think that that is something that we're unlikely to see.
Speaker: change back to how it was for a long time.
Speaker: Yeah, I think there's the, what is precious about an antique has shifted a little bit.
Speaker: For a lot of the market we deal in, what is precious about it to our customers is not the fact that it is an antique.
Speaker: It is in that it is sturdy and it has lasted and will continue to last.
Speaker: And while those two things are quite similar, they're not exactly the same.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, that's fascinating.
Speaker: And I love hearing that perspective.
Speaker: And I love hearing about this kind of demand.
Speaker: It makes me feel good about my own future in the antiques world.
Speaker: And I hope listeners feel the same way about it.
Speaker: There really is a lot to look forward to.
Speaker: And on that note, I think I'll let you go.
Speaker: Pippa Piddle and Ben Davidson, thanks so much for joining me.
Speaker: Thank you so much for having us.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: That's our show.
Speaker: Thanks for tuning in.
Speaker: All my best for the holidays.
Speaker: And I'll look forward to talking to you again in January when we'll be doing a special episode with the online virtual winter show.
Speaker: Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati.
Speaker: Our music is by Trap Rabbit.
Speaker: And I'm your host, Ben Miller.
