Articles» IN FOCUS: Benches
In the British Isles we speak of "home and hearth", a picture in my mind of an architectural yard somewhere in Cardiff or the Black Country, left right and centre stacks of iron fireplaces. We were the first industrialised nation and these pieces, the physical manifestations of the heart/hearth of a home were removed when many terraces and streets were pulled down in the 60s and 70s.
A scene out of DH Lawrence or the terraced house of my grandparents in Accrington, the cobbled Hozier St., my grandfather, a veteran of the Western Front, sat with pipe in armchair, by the fireplace, gently inhaling and exhaling air through pursed lips and a contemplative low whistle and the solemn tick of a longcase clock. All he knows, all he has gleaned from his experience, either something or not very much, whirls in a slow vortex of pipe smoke, and settles onto the spot.
For the working and lower classes in Europe 100 yrs ago, and especially in the Eastern half of Europe, they were still country folk, peasants rather than factory workers in towns like most of us. For them it was not the hearth, the fireplace, with firedogs and poker, coal bucket, mantelpiece with ornaments and mirror and pipe smoke that was the emotional hub and centre of family life but the covered wooden porch with bench.
To imagine the country homes in the peasant regions of Europe, if you have not been there, then imagine not brick dwellings but wooden plank built houses such as you have seen in American t.v. drama and westerns. Some large, some small but even the smallest often with covered verandah or terrace or porch with seating and here your grandparents would sit, the womenfolk young and old would sit and spin, the father and his sons would rest here too after a hard day in the fields taking refreshments and survey their acreage, modest allotment or yard or whatever it was.
This would in a literal as well as figurative sense be the family seat - the phrase itself "family seat" refers to the idea of a place that is the centre or fulcrum of a wider family or clan and usually refers to a house or a general area but in ancient times there probably was within a domicile in the clan capital an actual seat or bench where the clan leader or the head of the tribe sat and this would be the honorific and symbolic place where he or she would be received when giving audience and on occasions of importance.
Given this apparent importance of the bench one can see why many of the benches we have found from the villages in Europe can be so appealing, consider that each one was THE family bench. Unlike the factory made fireplaces of Britsh post-industrial towns these benches are often uniquely made or in cases uniquely decorated for an individual home, what is more they have normally acquired rich patination through daily use and often have unique areas of wear. No wonder they don't have the same "feel" as a repro version.
The old European benches are generally made of pine but with hardwood frame, that means the leg/arm supports, and they were almost always painted, sometimes in tribal colours, often green or blue, or with folk painting if for a marriage and then again often with grain painting (decorative staining and painting that imitated the grain effect of hardwoods like oak).
We have had benches where the paint on the seat is completely worn away to the pine, and the pine is often richly coloured as a consequence, another bench might have the paint worn away on the back rest but at one end suggesting somebody in customary fashion stood at one end of the bench resting their hands. On other occasions, the underside of bench seats have been completely covered in old postcards and famiy history. Sometimes people have written birth dates and marriage dates of family members on the underside of the seat. Sometimes the maker of the bench has painted their name on the front of the bench and sometimes it is painted in freehand like a signature with date on the back or again on the underside of the lid. Marriage benches often have the initials or the names and marriage date of the betrothed to either side on the front panel. So the benches, like dowry chests, were often used as a repository for family heirlooms and history.
Benches were not always sited on verandah, and probably in winter anyway they would come inside. Often the peasant houses had one long room often taking up the whole size of the residence on the ground floor and the bench would reside in that room alongside the wall.
Benches like those were are referring to come from all across Europe especially from Sweden, Germany, Austria, Russia, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, and many other areas. Given the importance of the bench in the family it is not suprising there have been so many benches available over the last few decades and many of these country benches whilst much scarcer now can still be bought for very reasonable prices as you can see from our website. In terms of their combination of soulful and artistic antique appeal and practicality they must be the most value for money item of antique country furniture on the market.
Furniture and cabinet makers have been making reproduction Hungarian box benches for years but even ten years ago they were in the region of £2500 per piece whilst an original piece can be bought from us for nearly a fifth of this figure.
The foreign dealers, struggling to find good condition antique examples, soon cottoned onto the repro market and some very poor quality examples have been churned out and exported into Western markets for 10-15 yrs now, The antique benches are sometimes too big for modern houses and the repro makers have fared best with mini box settles.
I remember visiting a village in Romania where the gypsy boss had half the village involved in the manufacture of repro mini box benches, they were hastily made, all yellow pine, prone to warping and shrinkage, some of the seats were leaving the workshop already twisted and ill fitting, the wood was untreated for woodworm, as the benches were being loaded onto a container bound for the US or Holland, in conveyor belt fashion, from the door of the carpenters' workshop to the back of the metal box, one gypsy lady was applying wax with a brush while the next lady in line hastily polished it off.
I marvelled that anybody would want to deal in such poor quality fare but clearly there are those who just want a bench to fit somewhere with storage in the same way that there are people who just want to fill their stomach with a bit of lunch and the cheaper the better. No doubt a bench costing two hundred or a bit more can be painlessly dispensed with in a few years if no longer required. On the other hand a bench in a kitchen costing as much as 3000 and though very soundly made but lacking the merit of antique charm one might find hard to dispense with or get much return on in 6 or 8 years time when you decide to change the look of your kitchen or move house.
Buying an antique box bench such as those you can see on our site for the kinds of prices on offer would seem a much better option - and in a few years you may well find it has become a firm family friend and you have built a relationship with it and would not want to part with it even if moving home. From another perspective, given the rapid disappearance of good quality benches from areas of Europe such as Hungary and Slovakia where they used to be plentiful and given the prices currently being paid even on the domestic market in those countries recently it's hard to believe that buying a really good antique box bench for up to £600 say properly renovated does not represent a loss free investment should one in a few years down the line decide to sell it. It is surely well known that much antique furniture purchased in recent decades especially brown has not yielded the anticipated profit as an investment but at present the types of benches were are discussing might prove to be an exception.
The fashion for painted furniture and the internet as the market place creates a problem for the buyer - it is hard when a bench has been newly painted to see the difference online between a repro bench or a not very old and a genuine antique or old vintage example.
It is always worth asking questions, seeing in the flesh or asking for more photographs. Benches that are cheap repros can seem not far different from a 100 yr old example when re-finished but seen up close they could be very different. The new ones tend to be all pine whereas an old piece is normally as noted above hardwood in the leg and arm supports. The overall weight is also an indicator as the timber in the repro versions is thinner and they will be liable to warpage.
Painted benches can conceal all sorts, legs are often prone to wear and it is back legs that often have had to be repaired. There is nothing wrong with this but the paint conceals this history and it ought to be checked. Legs sat on damp floors are the parts that will have been most suspectible to woodworm infestation and we have heard often of benches with legs weakened by worm being left untreated and unfixed by unscrupulous dealers and then newly painted, they look fine but break with the merest pressure.
The fact is that most English retailers don't employ restorers so they are depending on sourcing furniture from abroad that has been restored by others - but to what standard?
There are country benches of the Hungarian and Austrian variety that have pretty "baroque" forms, curving backs and arm rests, like ref 2558 on our website. These are increasingly hard to find so dealers in the countries of origin sometimes take a plain bench and have the ends and even the backs re-carved. This is not obvious when painted but a close up inspection reveals all.
Other things to look out for with benches is the interior. What is the condition - the interiors can sometimes be very wormed and ought to be replaced, the wood may be soft or wormy but sanded to make it look better. Retailers trying to buy in stock ready restored often have benches that are slightly loose at the joints, the seat might dip when you sit on it, the seat might have warped slightly. Many of these pieces have been in damp houses or barns and when removed by the finders left out in the direct sun at which point the seat will invariably shrink and lift at the corners.
Over the years we have built up a lot of return custom from high end retail and designers all over the world and so it has been essential to restore our benches to a high standard. Our benches go through several processes before they appear on the website. This always includes treatment for the prevention of woodworm and rot with non-odorous or toxic methods and thorough checking of all by a joiner to replace and attend to any wood repairs. After this the restoration process may also include cleaning, scraping back of later paint, re-painting by experienced professionals and sealing using our tried and trusted formulaes of varnish or wax. Each piece is treated as an individual and the way it is restored whether painted, original colour retained, or scraped back and how much and how far is all done rather like in an artists studio where the artist's eye is leading the way and the workers move the object forward to the point where it looks right and is ready to go.
Undoubtedly the internet has contributed to a deflating of prices for antique benches from Europe not so much because of giving the consumer a wider choice of outlet which really can't be knocked and is a good thing but as photographs and a brief description are often the sum of information offered it has been difficult for the buyer to discern quality, to distinguish the genuinely old from the not very old and on the basis of the information offered it is often difficult to glean any information whatsoever about the level of restoration undertaken and actual condition and solidity. Consequently good pieces properly restored have been compared wrongly against inferior goods.
Right now the country benches from Europe are available at great prices though the situation will undoubtedly change as supply diminishes and as with everything the better pieces will command more money. One of our best Eastern European benches we sold a few years ago for £900 and it re-appeared at auction in London where it fetched with premium around £3,500. Another piece dating from the 1920s we sold for £550 and the buyer being canny immediately placed it into a London saleroom where it fetched nearly £2000 with commission.
These sorts of prices are by no means out of the way for country furniture just suprising at present for pieces coming from Eastern Europe. But watch this space as I have noted how much young buyers in Czech and Hungary are prepared to pay for their heritage and things are rapidly changing. In Russia. where we used to buy very nice benches, it does not seem possible to buy at all now as there are indigenous collectors including one billionaire on the Abramovich scale who is building museums and employing researchers to record his collections.
Country benches from Ireland and the UK customarily sell for 4 figures. Our indigenous antique country benches are different from the European models. There are railway benches of course and garden benches (a separate subject) but the classic country British bench is a high backed and curving settle sometimes with drawers below the seat and these were in pubs or in farmhouses and used by the fireside. The high back and backboards reaching flush to the floor prevented drafts. These normally seem to come from the West Country, the Welsh Borders but they were prevalent in all country areas 200 yrs ago. You can see a nice one in the Fleece Inn in Bretforton, there was a splendid one in the Boat Inn in Walberswick and now all the Adnam's pubs in Southwold seem to have more than one. To see one as it would have been used in it's time you can refer to Rowlandson's splendid illustration in Dr Syntax's Tour of the Picturesque Or see our ref. 1689. We have two others we are working on.
Normally these benches are in pine or elm, it is hard to find them at all and to find one that retains its original colour is very hard - and this is reflected in the price.
Another typical British country bench would the oak box settle with flat back, these are also usually 18th century. There is the bacon settle, with cupboard above, rarer but available at good prices nowadays and the monk's bench where the back rest flips up to make a table, quite rare and often made up so be careful with those.
Irish country settles normally are bed settles. These were popular in the hey day of Irish pine twenty years back but really they were blown out of the water by the European benches that were cheaper and more practical. The Irish bed settles unfolded from the front, so the seat is not a lid but opens concertina fashion, fairly impractical but good if you want to use as a bed, which mostly nowadays we don't. Owing to the original purpose of these benches to mostly be a bed for a peasant, the seat is quite high, too high to be practical for use alongside a table.
These benches are pretty rare now and I still buy them if they turn up & in good condition and original condition. The last one I bought certainly was in original condition, it even had straw in it and some grubby but authentic patchwork quilts. I think this one sold to a theatre company doing a Synge play. Other Irish settles we have recently sold to furnish second homes in Ireland and for this of course practicalities can be overlooked in favour of the rare and perfect furnishing item.
The variant of this form of Irish settle even more rare but more splendid is the high backed bed settle. If you are lucky enough to find one of these you will hope it is an early one with a panelled back and architectural detailing and we have had a few nice ones of these over the years. If in original paint don't expect to be paying less than a few thousand.
A regional variant once common is the Cork Bench, These have high backs too and can be panelled and they have a really chunky look, they are not bed settles but sat on porchesand you can see a classic example on the front cover of Claudio Kinroth’s study of Irish country furniture.
The rustic country furniture often imitates the style of the finer town furniture and the smarter country pieces made in oak or mahogany. This is the case for the Irish pine and so the high back bed settles take their overall form from the English oak high back settle.
In Central Europe the benches from the 19th century imitate the neo classical salon sofa so you often find benches with swept or scrolling arm rests. Some benches have a lot of curves and have turned spindles to break up the design of back and arm rests and can be called "baroque" or "rococo" whilst in other examples the curves are really reined in and quite subtle with simple round fretwork supports and in these examples you can see an imitation of the neo-classical style.
Towards the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century the influence of the "modern style" or "art nouveau" (called in Austria "Secession") comes in and benches are made with very little curving form at all. Form becomes purer and simpler and more geometric. Flat backs and flat vertical supports, verticals and horizontals, make up the decorative elements.
Some of the most interesting benches are those that one can term "rustic" - these somebody made for themselves or they were made very locally, in the village. These are often one-off pieces, they may imitate town furniture but in an eccentric way or they are may not imitate it at all. The decorative motifs may be traditional and from old country folk influence or archaisms. The timber is often worked using older type tools and the overall look can be primitive.