Notebook

I Some thought about recent stories in the media

Dollhouse miniatures have received some attention from mainstream media recently with an article appearing the Wall Street Journal last week and the announcement that Winterthur is going to display a huge dollhouse during the holidays that was gifted to them by the estate of a woman in Connecticut. Social media has picked up on these stories and my facebook pages have seen them reposted on an almost daily basis. I believe any mainstream media publicity about dollhouses and miniatures is a good thing in general, but I do have a couple of issues with these stories that I've been considering and discussing with cohorts.

First, the Wall Street Journal article. I heard about this story last month from someone who was contacted by the author while it was being researched and prepared and I was sort of perturbed by what I heard about the author's queries and the sort of story she was clearly trying to promote. She wanted to draw some sort of parallel between the markets for dollhouses and full-sized houses and wanted to devote a lot of attention to the most expensive houses she had heard about. So she was contacting auctioneers and people she had heard about who paid big money for their dollhouses. One of the houses she was most fixated upon was Elaine Diehl's Astolat. Some of you may recall when it was displayed in New York last year prior to being offered at auction. The hype about the house at that time was that it was valued at seven million dollars yet it failed to sell and is still looking for a buyer or another venue where it can be offered for sale. Curiously, no one seems to know where that ridiculous number comes from. I assumed it was provided by the owner (no responsible appraiser would have assigned such an outlandinsh value to it) with the hopes that the ridiculously inflated figure would somehow draw wealthy would-be buyers to the auction, who might not recognize the inexpensive Petite Princess and Sonia Messer furniture that decorated some of the rooms, or the poorly applied moldings and wallpapers. At the time, I thought is was so insane that it was actually funny. But then when this writer started calling people and asking about this multi-million dollar house last month and buying into the hype, I started to feel a familiar concern about what happens when people who don't know much about miniatures start to carry on about crazy prices. They get other uninformed people to think that if that house is so valuable, then their dollhouse might be worth a lot as well.

Here's the thing: There is almost NO market for second-hand HUGE dollhouses. Outstanding antique houses like those sold at Noel Barrett's auctions in the past ten years have an historic value that doesn't really have anything to do with what someone paid for it years ago, or what the value of the silverware or dolls inside it might be. Truly wonderful antique dollhouses have an historic importance that outweighs the actual monetary value, and they are a completely different animal when compared to something like Astolat or the insanely over-priced Broel houses on ebay that have found no buyers for YEARS.

Huge dollhouses custom-made for specific collectors are problematic when they come to the secondary market. They almost always reflect a particular vision of the owner and often have no or very limited appeal to anyone else, and there are fewer and fewer collectors who have either the room or inclination to purchase something as big and ungainly as Astolat. An entire generation of older collectors have reached an age where they now want to pass on their houses and contents in the marketplace they are having very limited success in doing so.

Despite all the hype that attended the sale of Cookie Ziemba's collection at Hindman's two years ago, most of her houses sold for a small fraction of what she paid for them and I fear some of the English houses cos tore just to ship them to the State than were paid for them at the auction. Her big houses were prohibitively expensive for anyone to ship to a new home and that's just one reasons they did poorly. The pool of potential buyers for these houses is so much smaller than it was ten or 20 years ago when the houses were first commissioned. SO many museums that might have been interested 20 years ago are either closed or no longer willing to spend a lot of capital when their other expenses are growing by leaps and bounds. Many museums refuse donations unless they come with a trust fund for their upkeep, which I suspect may have been the case with the Winterthur house. So without the museums in the potential buyer pool, there are very few private collectors who want to buy someone else's monster house, especially when it is filled with so much commercial furniture like those Broel houses in New Orleans. It is hard to fathom how they come up with the values they place on them but for that one universal myth so many poeple cling to: that what they spend is what it's worth.

People really need to understand that new dollhouses, especially commercial ones, are like new cars in that they lose a lot of value as soon as you bring them home. When you go to resell them, you are NOT going to get an amount of money anywhere near what you spent. This also true when it comes to commercial dollhouse furniture and a lot of more common artisan things as well. Unless you buy only the very best and most rare artisan work, you should not be looking at your collection as some sort of investment. Seriously. You can spent a LOT of money of your stuff, but it doesn't mean it will hold or increase in value. NONE of the mass media articles ever mention this fact, and I feel they actually encourage people to think of all miniatures as investments. No, no, NO.

I still shudder when I recall a visit to another collector's house where she extended her arm outward to present the vista of her multi-room collection and said "This is my 401K". It doesn't work that way, and irresponsible newspaper articles only promote this fallacy.

I was actually relieved when Astolat was never mentioned in the article when it finally appeared in print, but I was appalled at the amount of space devoted to the House Broel collection. Mulvany and Rogers deserve all the good press they gather, but touting this mediocre collection in New Orleans really annoyed me. The same Lawbre house they want $85,000 for on ebay sold for only $2000 at auction in May -  unfurnished, yes - but the same model house. Listen up, folks. Your Lawbre house is NOT going to increase in value even if it is a limited edition, just like your LE Olszewski figurines are worth only a small fraction of what you paid for them back in the 1990's. When commercial ventures create things for the sole purpose of being collected, you should be very very cautious. Look what happened to Longaberger.

As for the house at Winterthur, my impression is that this is another huge house designed for a specific taste and while the quality of the furnishings is better than anything you see in the Broel houses, I can't imagine this house selling for very much at auction, so it was probably a good move for the estate to donate it and take a tax credit. I'm surprised they found a place as prestigious as Winterthur willing to take it unless it came with a nice endowment. I can't help thinking that I know a lot of other houses better than this one that would be more appropriate to that venue, but it's fate is going to be better than the huge house house I bought last year from Mary Kaliski's collection. Mary's family said she paid $20,000 for it. I bought it for $200 when it failed to sell at auction. It cost the auction house more than that just to pick it up from her home in Long Island and bring it to the auction hall. No wonder so many auctioneers are hesitant to accept big dollhouses for consignment.

I have read the Winterthur interns' blog about cleaning and "restoring" the house for display and had a chuckle over their self-congratulatory posts when they figured out how to do things that miniatureists have known how to do for decades. And I think the clumsy way they wired up the pictures to hang on the walls totally distracts the viewer. Yes, they figured out that wax and Blu-tac are no-no's, but thjere are much better ways to do it had they just asked somebody. It's funny. (9.14.2016)

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I want to share a recent experience I had with the new editor of Miniature Collector magazine.

As I was coming to the end of my reconstruction project involving Mary Kaliski's huge Victorian mansion, I was contacted by the new editor of the magazine asking me when was I going to have another auction. For some reason he thought I was an auctioneer. I corrected him and then mentioned that my Swedish farmhouse project might interest his readers as Mary's articles and photographs had been a fixture of the magazine for so many years, and MC ran multiple auction recaps when her collection was sold after her death. He asked me to provide some photos of my project so he could discuss it with his editorial board. What board? He is the only editor. There's an art director who lays out the magazine and there is guy who sells ads. That's about it. If you check the most recent table of contents, they had ONE contributor and Stan wrote all the rest of the copy.

If you have been a subscriber for some time, you have seen the magazine become very thin these days. The thickest issues are those with multiple ads for the big miniatures shows. Over the past few years, I have watched the emphasis shift from profiles of fine artisans and great collections to amateurish "show 'n tell" photo spreads with poor quality pictures submitted by readers accompanied by captions full of errors and incorrect attributions of artists' work. People who send in their photos for the "theme" issues are paid nothing. I doubt they even get a free copy of the magazine to send to their mothers. But the magazine gets free content that they then sell to their readers.

Once in a while they cover a dollhouse exhibit somewhere and they repeat whatever it says in the press release from the organization without any fact-checking or spelling makers' names correctly. An example from a few issues back was the exhibit of some Swedish dollhouses at Bard College's exhibit space in Manhattan. An antique dollhouse was featured and the magazine'stext appeared to be copied verbatim from something provided by Bard. It said all the furnishings had been handmade by a teenage boy, yet the house was filled with commercial German furniture, including the wall telephone we see in every other antique dollhouse, but which the "curators" of the exhibit stated had been made by this boy. It's not the first time the magazine has repeated incorrect information and I'm sure it won't be the last.

That's not the thing that really irked me after my contact with the editor. No, my issue is that when he came back to me and said they would like to publish such an article, I spent weeks of my time taking photos and writing enough text for TWO articles - one about the reconstruction and the second about furnishing the house. After I submitted the articles and photos, he came back to me with a release document to sign. I wrote back and said the document said nothing about payment. That's when he told me they wanted to run the article as one long piece because their readers prefer to read the story in one issue instead of serialized over two or more issues. And he offered me only $100 for the entire thing.

Let me take you back to 2002 when my first article appeared in the magazine. It was about Tynietoy furniture and in those days, I used a 35mm camera and mailed actual photos or negatives to the magazine, at my cost. I was paid $250 for that and for subsequent articles for almost ten years. Then toward the end of Barbara Aardema's tenure, they started cutting the payments down to $225 and gradually lower and lower. I stopped writing full-length articles and focused on one-page articles about vintage artists and interesting auction purchases. One of the last submission I sent to Barbara Aardema was when she asked me for photos of Roger Gutheil furniture to illustrate her article about him as the Gutheils retired. Before I was paid for my pictures, Barb retired and her replacement, Cindy Erickson, told me Barb had left no instructions to pay me. It took several months to get paid after Cindy said they did not want to pay me anything at all. I had to point out to them that Barb had contacted me asking for photos they could use and that I had not just sent them in unsolicited. After that, the only things I sent to MC were some write-ups about the Rhoads auctions where instead of just quoting the catalogue descriptions and the hammer prices, I tried to make it interesting by explaining the action on the floor and whether items sold on the phones or Internet, etc. MC never paid me anything for that work because they felt they were giving free publicity to Rhoads. I had to haggle to even get my byline on them.

And one more thing. When I was writing regular articles of MC, they would mail me three complimentary copies when the articles were published, along with a form for ordering additional copies if I wanted them. Then one day it was just one complimentary copy, and with that copy came something very interesting: a list of all the contributors for that issue and what they were paid. Someone made a mistake and sent me that list instead of the order form. And I learned that other people had been paid significantly more for their articles about plastic dolls and furniture from the 1950's than I had been paid for my article about artisan furniture. It was the last time I wrote an article for them.

So with this background, you may understand why I was stunned and then really annoyed to be offered only $100 for the equivalent of two full-length articles that were much more than just an inventory of the artists represented in the furnishings of the house, or a tip of the hat to some dealer or shop where something was procured. I told Stan no thanks and several days passed before he responded to say that surely I must be aware of the changes in print journalism and that they could no longer afford to pay me at the rate they had paid me 14 years ago. 

That was an interesting argument, considering that I still get paid quite generously by the other magazine I write for regularly. They don't seem to be in the same cost reduction mode as MC. Stan made it sound like he had worked some kind of miracle to get me $150 for the article. I turned that down as well and said I would take $250 for the double-length article and that I considered that roughly a 50% discount.

That was three weeks ago and I never heard anything back from Miniature Collector. I'd say that pretty much marks the end of my frustrating relationship with them. I want to thank all the people who have come up to me at shows and auctions to tell me they appreciate my articles and how helpful they found them. To me, that appreciation was as important, or even more important than any financial compensation I received from Scott Publications. I have published the entire article right here on my website, rather than accept an insulting token payment from Miniature Collector. (3.13.2016)s on ebay in the weeks leading up to the Philadelphia show to build up my cash reserves and when I came home last night I was a bit surprised that I'd spent only about half of it. It's now Sunday morning and I could go back and spend the rest of my money but I'm very satisfied with the things I purchased and feel no need to acquire more today. This is a new attitiude for me and I think it may stem from the fact that I have been working on an inventory of my collection. I have boxes and boxes of exquisite miniatures that have no homes and as I have been going through them to photograph them and attach inventory numbers, I've come to realize that I have ENOUGH. So when I arrived at the Philly show, I had no shopping list in hand and had already decided I would take my time and buy only things that are truly unique and delight my heart. Before I share those, just a few comments about the show:

>What Makes It Artisan?

I don't buy a lot of things on ebay these days, but I browse it when I can to monitor the selling prices, particularly for artisan miniatures. One thing I notice lately is an awful lot of Bespaq type furniture that sellers describe as artisan, and then I see Bespaq furniture that has been somehow modified and thus acquires an artisan label. Neither of these examples fits my definition of artisan furniture.

I do acknowledge that the wood carving skills of some of the Chinese factory workers are pretty good and sometimes even better than the skills of some individuals who have been awarded artisan status by the IGMA over the years, but I think there is a fairly distinct line to be drawn between the artisan who carefully designs and then personally constructs and finishes a limited number of things and the nameless person laboring away in a factory setting executing someone else's designs over and over again and then sending the pieces to someone else to spray a cheap finish over it to disguise the inferior materials used in its construction. And I feel the same way about vintage Sonia Messer furniture and even Carl Forslund miniatures. You can appreciate the handwork done when these items are hand-carved, but they are the products of a factory setting where no one person was responsible for the entire process of creating those items.

I have a different regard for Chestnut Hill - some of it. Chestnut Hill sometimes sold commercial pieces made by Lynnfield/Block House but some of the nicest furniture was made by Roger Gutheil before he went out on his own and those particular pieces as well as the hand-painted ceramics, I class as artisan work. And for the most part, their resale value indicates that my opinion is shared by other collectors of vintage artisan miniatures.

Some commercial furniture is very nice. Before it was Bespaq, Pit Ginsberg's furniture was made from hardwoods with a nice finish and sold under the name Fantastic Merchandise - I like that stuff better than Bespaq. And I collected Lynnfield for a long time because when it was produced, it was the nicest commercial furniture available at that time, but over the past ten years I have gradually moved away from most commercial furnishings, sold off a lot of it, and narrowed the focus of my collecting to true artisan furniture. I am thrilled to own some one-of-a-kind Eric Pearson pieces that were custom designed and made for one client. And the experience of working for several auction houses that have handled artisan furniture has shown me over and over again that they are the one area of collecting miniatures that continues to hold its value.

I remember when Petite Princess furniture sold for a lot of money in the early days of ebay - the same for Lynnfield. Then everybody started cleaning out their attics and selling miniatures on ebay and the market became completely saturated and once again those commercial items held little or no value for serious collectors.

I'm also a little concerned about Bespaq furniture that gets repainted or re-upholstered and then is sold as artisan furniture. Like many others, I like the look of the commercial items that get the Whitledge treatment but I don't consider it artisan. And when people sell Bespaq that has been re-upholstered by Pat Tyler or Gail Steffey, I find it a little off-putting when the description makes no mention of the furniture's place of origin. There is nothing wrong with enhancing commercial furniture with artisan touches but I think people need to be forthright about it and not describe the items in any way that might lead someone to believe the artist made the furniture themselves.

I think an important thing people should keep in mind is that when you buy commercial furniture, you should not expect it to hold value the way artisan furniture has been. When it goes to auction, it doesn't matter that you spent a lot of money on Bespaq or Goebel figurines or Franklin Mint "collector" this or that. To an astute collector, those commercial things are just second-hand items while true artisan pieces are the only ones that can be considered investment quality.

The Market for Antique Miniatures

Something similar has happened to antique miniatures, although the decline in value has been affected by other factors. I think collectors came to realize that Schneegass furniture was once as plentiful as Bespaq is today. It was mass-produced for foreign markets by cheaply paid workers and when you think of it, pretty much every antique dollhouse you have seen in museums or well-publicized private collections has been full of the same ubiquitous furniture. Even Boulle furniture, unless it is a rare piece, has seen a decline along with ormolu.Ten years ago pricing was competitive but today the market has not only become softer, but there are noticeably fewer collectors for it. Some of the folks who used to be major buyers who affected pricing trends have either died or faded from the landscape, and at the same time, the people who collected antique dollhouses and miniatures have curtailed their buying habits as they have seen that market decline over the past ten years. There are few new collectors coming into the market for antiques and it strikes me that they often have never heard of the once-famous collectors and pioneering scholars like Vivien Greene and Flora Gill Jacobs. They hear the names from older collectors but never met the ladies nor saw their collections in situ and so the allure that used to be associated with those names seems to have faded a bit. Her name was never even mentioned at the auction when the remains of Flora's personal collection were sold by Noel Barrett in early 2014. Some of the collectors whose aggressive bidding affected prices at the first sale ten years ago are no longer with us and others are more concerned about selling their own collections than buying for them.  It does surprise me a little that Noel got such a prominent collection after what happened with the Winston-Salem Museum sale. When money is on the table, people do funny things, don't they?