Drexel Heritage Distressed Side Table with Drawer, c. 1975–1995

The Piece

A square side table by Drexel Heritage, with one long drawer, a shaped apron and four turned legs, finished in a warm reddish brown with heavy antiquing throughout.

The top is laid out as random width, random length planking, bordered by a molded edge with a scratch bead run inside it. The drawer front carries a routed bead outline and a cast bail handle in a dark antiqued silver, with beaded rosettes and a rosette and scrollwork cast into the bail itself. A pierced keyhole sits above the handle. Below the drawer the apron drops into a long undulating scalloped profile on all visible sides.

The legs are the best part of the design. Each starts as a heavy compressed ball where it meets the apron, tapers down a long column, and finishes in a collar, a turned cup and a small pad foot. They are solid turned hardwood and they lift the case well clear of the floor, which is what gives the table its light stance despite the mass of the top.

The brass oval maker's medallion is fixed inside the drawer.

History & Provenance

Drexel Furniture Company was founded in 1903 in Drexel, North Carolina, by Samuel Huffman and five Morganton businessmen on fourteen thousand dollars, starting with about fifty workers making oak bedroom and bathroom furniture. Under Robert O. Huffman, who became president in 1935, the firm moved deliberately away from the low end toward medium priced quality goods, and by 1950 it held roughly one and a half percent of national wood household furniture sales.

In January 1957 Drexel acquired Heritage Furniture, Inc. of High Point and Mocksville, and the combined business became Drexel Enterprises Inc. By that year it ranked among the largest American makers of middle and upper priced bedroom and dining room furniture, with a twelve hundred piece line sold through some twenty five hundred stores. It passed to U.S. Plywood Champion Papers in 1968 for a hundred million dollars in stock, to Dominick International in 1977, and to Masco in 1986. The name Drexel Heritage Furnishings came into use after the 1977 sale.

What the table itself says is worth stating plainly, because it is the kind of thing a dealer will check. The top is veneered, and the plank layout is scribed into it rather than built from separate boards. Short cross lines are cut at intervals to suggest board ends, which is a decorative treatment and not joinery. The antiquing is factory work as well. Fly speck spatter, fine scratching and worm track squiggles run across the top, the drawer front and the apron, and they sit under the finish rather than through it, which means they were applied at the factory before the piece was sealed.

None of that is a fault. It is how Drexel built its Old World and European country lines, and it is executed well here. The legs are solid turned stock, the apron is properly shaped, the hardware is cast rather than stamped, and the whole piece is heavier and better made than the look-alikes that followed it.

Dating rests on the brand and the idiom rather than on a document. The Drexel Heritage name places the table after the Heritage acquisition and, as a corporate name, after 1977. The heavily distressed veneered country look with turned baluster legs belongs to the last quarter of the twentieth century. No model number or date code has been located on this example, so the range given is an estimate from style and construction and is stated as such.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

A square top on tall turned legs is a useful shape. It takes a lamp and a book and a drink without crowding, the drawer swallows the things that otherwise live on the surface, and the open leg stance keeps a small room from feeling blocked.

The finish is the reason to buy it rather than something plainer. A warm reddish brown with real surface incident reads as lived in from the first day, which means it will sit happily beside genuine antiques without either one showing the other up, and it will take a scratch without anyone noticing.

For a dealer or a designer, Drexel Heritage is a name a client recognizes and a quality level that holds up under handling. This is a transitional piece in the useful sense. It has enough period language in the turnings and the apron to work in a traditional room, and enough weight and simplicity to work in a plainer one.