And it may help of the furniture is Chinese which, of course, is not in the index.
Evidence of a bottoming out of what was once the basis of the Australian antique market is proving a little less elusive than it once was. At least a little more antique English furniture is now selling.
Some accommodation between buyers and sellers is being registered as vendors come to terms with the reality that prices of around one quarter to one tenth of the cost of those paid in the 1980s represent good value for both buyers and sellers in a market still obsessed with the minimalism that has put so many antique dealers out of business.
"They have decided they cannot wait for ever for Madonna, or some other pop star to decorate with it, and for her new home filled with it to feature in Belle Magazine," says Sydney North Shore auctioneer David Barsby. This is one of the few ways that any dramatic turnaround might be entertained, he says.
At best though a Madonna-lead revival would surely just be a continuation of the interest in the single stand-out piece that occasionally focuses on English furniture. This is the second proviso. Stand out items are hot especially when two would be buyers decide they have a spot for it.
Both locally and overseas furniture offered in both rooms and house sales that have come from a good source appear to be attracting the same interest attached to smalls and other offerings from the same source. Although he does not delve into the causes, "Down but not out" is how John Andrews analyses the state of the market as revealed by the level of the Antique Furniture Price Index for as it opens 2011.
He points to individual flashes of enthusiasm after a poor summer and a mixed autumn an increase in the number of dealers expressing opinions that prices were moving upwards. Some record cracking prices were written for superb quality provenanced pieces but the index is more concerned with antique furniture that is accessible to those "without country estates and apartments in Monaco."
The index, which was established at 100 in 1968, dropped in the latest year to from 2736 to 2505.
Early Victorian and late mahogany which are the periods the index covers most likely to be of interest to Australia, fell 8 per cent and of similar interest, Regency furniture fell 9 per cent.
Early mahogany furniture was down 8 per cent while the falls in oak furniture, down 12 per cent, and country furniture, down 10 per cent, were thought to represent not quite the sudden dip they suggested but a catching up on what has been reported in the saleroom for sometime.
Even while the great container import boom of the 1970s and 1980s was built on the likes of mahogany balloon back chairs and large credenzas, oak and country have also had their supporters Down Under. Not for nothing was merchant John Mort's mansion in Darling Point, Sydney in the mid 1800s called Greenoakes while much later (1970s) Melbourne dealer John Dunn's imports placed many outstanding pieces in collections in Australia.
Philip Thomas at Raffan, Kelleher and Thomas in Sydney, says that only a revival in formal dining at home could return the market to its former glory. The food revolution seen in the multiplication of TV shows devoted to its preparation does not yet appear to have returned the focus of the home to the dining room.
"The formal dining room is dead." he says, and it shows in the demand for mahogany extension tables which 10 years ago might have made $5500 to $6500 being slow sellers at $2000 to $3000. Belying the state of the new book market, bookcases have been in keen demand in a Victorian furniture market long trounced by French and country antiques, although there the malaise has also been endemic.
"You can sell Victorian bookcases, but not copies of Encyclopaedia Britannica to put in them," Thomas says.
Perhaps English brown furniture will rise on the coat tails of Chinese brown furniture. Everything Chinese is hot as the "overseas Chinese" crowd into salerooms around the world and "trawl" for anything remotely with their heritage written upon it.
It is true that Chinese furniture makers also tended to use darker woods, so that "black furniture" might be more descriptive of their contribution to today's furniture prices but there is a lot of work in lighter woods too.
Vendors must be hoping that this interest in the traditionally more cluttered look of Chinese decorative arts might spread to British Victorian, that the same Chinese in fact might spread their interest to English - their former "colonial masters" - as prosperity spreads.
Any take up by Chinese buyers would represent an extraordinary reversal of financial esteem. Late colonial furniture makers boasted about work that did not involve local Chinese manufacture. Such a trend would certainly satisfy any pretensions to a new Imperial order.
One of the latest displays of such a Chinese factor was at an auction house not usually known for its brown furniture. At Davidson's in February the sale of the estate of a respected member of the Sydney Armenian community packed the rooms to the rafters. The bulk of the collection was Chinese smalls such as ivories and porcelains but quality Chinese furniture made in the 1940s possibly in Singapore and in the traditional Chinese taste was snapped up.
The Chinese have long appreciated reproductions much more than westerners, and this readiness appears to have been heightened as earlier pieces become difficult to find. But again, as in the west, it may just also come down to quality. No one wants the second-rate in anything any more.
The same ethnic buying, that has also embraced decorative art sales by the larger houses, was seen at Julian Aalders' sale of the Doreen Chapman collection in Sydney February.
Sydney dealer Martyn Cook says that outstanding prices for half a dozen lots in the international salerooms in the past 18 months proved that the triumphs of 18th and early 19th centuries were still well appreciated. The difficulties experienced in the market did not represent a full blooded rejection of the periods or styles but a selectivity based on quality and excellence.
Trying to buy the best was just as difficult as buying from other schools or periods, he says. From the last 40 lots on which he had placed well rounded bids in the saleroom he had secured only three items, Cook says. Interest can still sustain stg4 million for a commode, he points out.
John Albrecht, managing director of Leonard Joel's in Melbourne says that the company's weekly sales have begun to look like their quarterly special sales had been a few years ago.
Faced with the option of just storing the furniture in the garage, those who have inherited the brown furniture are beginning of come to terms with the new price regime and accept what they are offered for it.
After all, vendors of works by the artist Ernest Buckmaster, whose landscapes and flower pieces were part of the same decor, have come to accept $5000 a more representative value for one of his works than the $10,000 to $20,000 once common.
There is not so much collecting the periods or styles per se, that is, making whole rooms of it. Rather they are mixing it. They have made a similar exit from the very elaborate boulle furniture of the French 18th and centuries. One piece, a highlight, is often enough and it has to make a statement.
Eclecticism and provenance have explained some of the prices paid for antique English furniture at the sales held by Mossgreen Auctions over the past two years, says managing director Paul Sumner. Catalogues of mixed private collections held in situ or in the rooms have been punctuated by solid prices well in excess of admittedly toned down estimates, he says. At the Dunraven sale held at the Toorak mansion of that name in November last not only were respectable prices achieved for sofa tables, bookcases and sideboards but mahogany triple pillar mahogany dining table made its mark at $10,980.
Sydney's Veronica Bunda said the styles still represent value in terms of comfort, compared to the modern design which has been exciting more attention in the saleroom. Not everyone has the body of a ballerina that is capable of negotiating some of the wildly shaped-for-profile moulded furniture of this period.
The more sanguine and dreamy eyed must even be eyeing those insurance company cheques, as in Australia flood victims refurnish. Much of the demand for antique furniture has been of late outside metropolitan areas. That is victims, of course, of floods that came down from the heavens rather than from rising rivers.
Both the victims and dealers should be so lucky.
Many dealers specialising in 18th and 19th century furniture have left the industry and the "doctors wives" and college students who brought it in, vanished from the field years ago.
But some still survive, especially in the country. Peter Valentine continues to travel overseas twice a year to buy, and the family's Bendigo business is now in its 65th year.