Brandt Warfield Mahogany Triple Pedestal Banquet Table, c. 1937–1950

The Piece

A mahogany banquet dining table on three pedestals, built in the Duncan Phyfe manner with reeded sabre legs, brass box caps and brass casters, and carrying its maker's name and a patent date stencilled on the frame.

It is made as three sections. Each end is a drop leaf table on a single square tapered column with four sabre legs swept out from the base. The centre is a twin pedestal, two columns standing side by side and joined by a turned baluster stretcher, on shared sabre legs. Put together with the slide, that gives four columns carrying the whole length, which is why a table of this span has no leg anywhere a diner would meet one.

The tops are laid in a ribbon figured mahogany, quartered so the stripe runs the full length in long parallel bands and catches light differently as you move round it. The edge is a reeded moulding finished in near black, and the same dark finish carries the pedestal columns, so the table reads as two tones: a bright figured field held inside a dark frame.

The extension is the engineering. Under the top runs a hardwood equalising slide of seven interlocking sections a side, machined with tongues and grooves cut to a tolerance you can still feel when it moves, with an iron equaliser arm to keep both halves opening together. It takes five leaves and opens to banquet length.

The brass is original and uncleaned, gone to a soft dull gold, and the casters still turn.

History & Provenance

This table tells you who made it and when, which almost none of them do.

Stencilled along one of the slide rails, in the factory's own block letters, is THE BRANDT CABINET WORKS, INC. Stencilled again on the frame, near the pedestal, is the pattern name WARFIELD, over PATENTED, over FEB. 23, 1937, over NO. D-103303.

That patent number resolves cleanly. United States design patent D-103,303, Design for an Extension Table, was filed on 8 January 1937 by Carl H. Brandt and granted on 23 February 1937. The stencil is not decoration and it is not a style attribution. It is the firm citing its own patent on its own product, and because a patent cannot be cited before it issues, the date on the frame is a hard floor. This table was made after 23 February 1937.

The Brandt Cabinet Works was founded in Hagerstown, Maryland in 1901 and traded for the better part of a century, selling under the line Brandt Furniture of Character. It was a serious American cabinet shop rather than a case goods assembler, and this table is the evidence: quartered figured veneers, hand fitted sabre legs, a seven section equalising slide, and cast brass caps and casters at a moment when most of the trade was already economising on all four. The works closed in the mid 1980s and a group of former employees carried the name on nearby for a while afterwards.

The Warfield was the pattern name for this model, and it is documented on other surviving examples of the same table. Warfield is a Maryland name of long standing, which is the sort of thing a Hagerstown firm named a flagship dining table after.

What matters commercially is the completeness. Banquet tables of this generation survive constantly. Their leaves do not. A set of five original leaves, the full slide, the equaliser arm and all three pedestals together, on a table that names its own maker and patent, is a different object from the anonymous refinished Duncan Phyfe table that turns up in every estate sale in America.

The tops have been refinished at some point. They are bright, even and glossy, with open grain and no crazing, ring marks or patina, and they read lighter and newer than the bases, which keep an older darker finish with honest rub through at the brass caps. That is stated plainly here because it is visible in the photographs and because it is the one thing that separates this from a wholly original example.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

This is the table you buy once. Eleven feet of it seats twelve without anyone straddling a leg, and because the weight is carried on three pedestals rather than on corner legs, the seating is continuous all the way round.

It also collapses gracefully, which is the part people underestimate. Take the leaves out and it is a dining table for six. Drop the leaves on one end section and you have a console for a hall or a sofa back. The two end sections will work as separate tables entirely, which means a dining room that expands for Thanksgiving and contracts again in December without anything being stored in a garage.

The ribbon figure is what makes it worth looking at rather than merely owning. Quartered mahogany laid this way changes as you walk past it, and against the near black edge and columns it holds a room the way a much more expensive English table does.

For a dealer or a designer, the documentation is the sale. Anyone can offer a Duncan Phyfe banquet table. Very few can point at the maker's stencil, the pattern name and a patent number that resolves to a named inventor and a specific day in February 1937, and then open the slide and produce all five leaves. That is the difference between selling a style and selling an object.