Oak Chest of Drawers with Geometric Moulded Fronts

There is a moment in English furniture, the decades after 1660, when the chest of drawers stopped being a box with drawers in it and became a piece of architecture and this is the form that moment produced. Four long drawers, each front built up with applied mouldings into raised geometric panels, the whole thing standing on four turned bun feet like a small building on its footings. Cabinetmakers have been copying the pattern ever since because they never improved on it.

The oak is the deep, warm brown that only comes from either three centuries of hands or a very patient finisher and the drawer fronts carry the design, twin rectangular panels on each of the four drawers, framed in stepped mouldings that throw a crisp shadow line across the front, with a half-round moulding separating each drawer from the next so the case reads as four distinct courses.

Down the centre runs a column of brass escutcheons over the keyholes, pierced and shaped and each panel carries a brass drop handle on a pierced backplate, the small bright notes that keep all that brown from going solemn. The top is a plain broad board with a moulded edge, the sides panelled and the bun feet are turned fat and low, exactly as they should be.

For the bedroom that wants its clothes kept in something with a lineage, the landing that needs one solid piece under a mirror or the collector of early English oak who knows this pattern by sight. Four drawers, four bun feet, three hundred years of the right idea.