Pair of English Art Deco Quarter-Sawn Oak Bedside Cabinets, c. 1925–1940

The Piece

A pair of English bedside cabinets in solid quarter-sawn oak from the Art Deco years, the plain, well made kind that came with a bedroom suite and have outlived everything else in it. Each is a tall, narrow case with a single cupboard door, a flat overhanging top and a deep plinth base, built in the frame-and-panel manner with the stiles and rails in straight-grained oak and the panels, doors and tops cut from boards of quarter-sawn oak with the broad silver ray figure, the tiger-stripe flake, that English cabinetmakers of the 1920s and 1930s prized and that catches the light from across a room. The doors hang on small steel butt hinges and carry a plain turned oak handle, a half-round baton set vertically and the only ornament on the piece, with a small escutcheon hole for a lock beside it. The plinths are slightly chamfered along the top edge, the tops have a softened front edge, and the whole design is in the stripped, rectilinear taste that the British furniture trade took from the Continental moderns and made its own.

The oak has a warm honey color under an old finish that has mellowed to a soft sheen, and the figure runs across the door and the side panel of each cabinet as a continuous wave. The pair is a true pair, built together to the same pattern and finish, with the doors hinged on the same side. The construction is solid oak throughout, no veneer and no secondary wood on the show surfaces, and the cases stand square and firm.

Condition is sound and honest. The doors open and close cleanly, the hinges are tight and the handles are original. One door has a shallow patch of lifted and lost surface in the flake at the upper right, a mark on the wood rather than a structural fault, and the other shows small chips to the finish at the edges; the tops have the light scratches and marks of eighty years of bedside use, and the plinths show scuffs at the base. The locks are not present and the escutcheon holes are open. The cabinets are offered as found, cleaned and waxed but not refinished.

History & Provenance

Oak bedside cabinets of this pattern were made in enormous numbers by the English furniture trade in the 1930s, when the great bedroom-suite makers of High Wycombe, London and the north turned out matching wardrobes, dressing tables, tallboys and pairs of bedside cupboards for the new semi-detached houses going up around every town. Solid quarter-sawn oak was the material of the better suites, and the figured boards were saved for the doors and tops where they would be seen. The cupboard itself was for the chamber pot and the night things, which is why the trade still calls them pot cupboards, and the tall narrow proportion was fixed by the height of the beds of the day. The wardrobes have mostly gone, too big for modern rooms; the bedside cabinets, in pairs, are the pieces that still sell, because they are exactly the right size for a bedside today.

No maker's mark is present and the pair is offered as an unattributed English trade piece. The dating rests on the materials and the construction rather than style alone: the solid quarter-sawn oak frame-and-panel cases, the steel butt hinges, the turned oak baton handles, the chamfered plinths and the mellowed original finish are all consistent with manufacture between about 1925 and 1940.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

A pair of plain oak bedside cabinets is one of the most useful things an old house ever produced. They flank a bed and take a lamp, a book and a glass of water on top with the clutter behind a door, they work as end tables beside a sofa or a pair of chairs, and set side by side they make a low console in a hall. The honey oak and the tiger flake sit as easily with white linen and pale walls as with the dark woods and leather of a collected room, and they bring a piece of 1930s England into a bedroom without a trace of fuss. For a shop or designer client they are the matched, solid, ready-to-place pair of period nightstands that interior buyers look for and rarely find still together.