This old thing? Why we should furnish our offices with antiques

Next week Sloane Street Auctions is holding a sale of some of Margaret Thatcher’s possessions: rugs, silverware, cut-glass decanters and furniture. One thing stood out: “The Dormer desk”, so called because it was bought by the Thatchers in the 1960s for their house in Kent, The Dormers. It then moved with them to their house in Chelsea, where they lived when Thatcher was leader of the opposition; she still owned it when she died in 2013.
In short, it has impeccable provenance and, to my eyes, it is rather elegant, with five drawers, a bow front and lots of legroom. Described in the catalogue as merely “antique”, it is Georgian style but almost certainly an Edwardian copy.
Whatever you may think of Thatcher, she was a giant of 20th-century politics and there are plenty of people who would relish sitting and writing at the same three feet of leather-topped mahogany where the Iron Lady honed her convictions.
The estimate is £1,000 to £2,000. It is an absurdly low sum and it has nothing to do with Thatcher’s reputation. She remains hot property in the auction world, not up there with Beatles memorabilia or Japanese contemporary art, but only a few years ago Christie’s sold one of her Aquascutum jackets for £30,000 and a bronze cast of her hands (made by Madame Tussauds) for £40,000 after being initially valued at £600.
No, the estimate is a reflection of the astonishing collapse in value for what antique dealers call “brown furniture”: Victorian dining room tables, Edwardian sideboards and the like. On The Saleroom, a clever online portal where most of Britain’s regional auction houses livestream their sales, this month a Victorian mahogany desk with nine drawers (more than enough storage for your never-to-be-answered correspondence) was sold for £15. There is no missing digit. Fifteen pounds. That is about the price of a Pret lunch nowadays.
It was not a complete outlier. There are tons of desks — well-made, sturdy pieces of furniture — that are being sold for less than £100. “It frustrates me beyond belief,” said Mark Wise, a director at Mitchells Antiques, based in Cockermouth, Cumbria. “Some of this stuff is now ludicrously cheap.” A Georgian bureau that might have fetched £1,000 back in the early 1990s can now be picked up for as little as £40.
Meanwhile, most standard modern office desks, available from specialist suppliers, cost about £150: ten times the price of the Victorian one, and they don’t include any drawers. Those ones cost north of £300.
More importantly, the modern office desk is one of the ugliest pieces of furniture ever designed. It is an item that sums up all that is most hellish about our atrophied working life: a piece of laminated MDF attached to four metal legs with a couple of cable ports for computer wires. They are functional, yes, but then so too is a hole-in-the-ground latrine and no one chooses that for their bathroom.
Companies often spend a fortune on funky breakout areas or stylish receptions but when it comes to desks, the places workers actually spend the most time, a sea of wipe-clean grey blandness is the order of the day.
Why can we not furnish our offices with antiques? I have some experience here, so I am not being flippant. A few years ago my wife and I bought a large, art deco-style house in the Lake District, Endymion House. The plan was to have both a comfortable holiday home and fund it by letting it out to people who wanted a bit of Poirot glamour along with their walking holiday. There was a snag, however. After restoring it we had almost run out of money and a six-bedroom house requires a vast amount of furniture.
It turns out that buying from auctions was not only genuinely cheaper than going to Ikea but also allowed us to track down period pieces. I found a stunning 1930s walnut dressing table and matching wardrobe — a pair that looked as if they had come straight off the Murder on the Orient Express film set — for £50.
Prices for old furniture remain depressed because of the lack of demand. Modern homes are too small to fit large dressers and tables and consumers that have the space are invariably bewitched by Scandi sleekness and kitchen islands not satinwood commodes.
If you are an office looking to save money, though, why not buy brown? It is true that facilities management departments need to ensure that workstations — a word that makes me shudder — have enough legroom and encourage good posture. Some Victorian so-called kneehole desks would not pass muster.
Hiding behind ergonomics regulations, however, is a flimsy excuse, according to Dean Connell, the creative director of I-AM.D.C, who designs modern offices. He has sometimes incorporated vintage pieces and told me: “My job is to give people a reason to come back to the office. Adding antique furniture adds character to the environment. It makes it something more than ‘you’re chained to your desk’.” Post-Covid workplaces need to be inspiring. If you furnish them as if they are a call-centre fitted out in 1994, no wonder employees want to carry on working from home.
There is another important reason that an antique desk is not a completely silly option. It has already survived a century and will probably last another. Sustainability has become paramount in the corporate world: do you really want to buy a chipboard-and-metal contraption with a five-year guarantee that can never be repurposed?
Also, what fun to sit at a desk, run your hand over the leather writing surface, open the mahogany drawers, admire the craftsmanship and wonder who else has sat here beforehand. Great offices have always been more than just a functional space. So let’s start by ditching the ghastly modern desks.