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Maine Antique Digest, May 2015 13-D
- FEATURE -
☞
S
andy Doig of Somers, Con-
necticut, sells the stuff that
everybody says nobody wants,
namely, brown furniture, in par-
ticular, lower- to mid-level formal
pieces and shellac-finished “high
country” items. He has been deal-
ing in this material for 30 years
and says he sees some stirrings in
the marketplace. He feels the era
of total collapse—that is, the era
of $300 slant-front desks and $100
Sheraton chests—may gradually be
coming to an end, and that, in some
places and for some forms, the mar-
ket is showing signs of a pulse.
“You still can’t sell a Pembroke
table to save your life,” Doig said.
“They’re still going down, and it’s
hard to give away card tables.”
Nevertheless he thinks that, overall,
things are starting to look up.
Doig is ideally placed to sense
shifts in the market. Although he
does some shows, he has always
considered himself a picker. “I deal
with a half-dozen to a dozen deal-
ers who do everything from East
Side [the Winter Antiques Show in
New York City] to hole-in-the-wall
shows,” he said. When the market
turns sour, he feels it immediately
because dealers stop buying.
Lately, however, at least some
dealers are buying. He said, “It’s
coming back.” He is also seeing
better results at auctions. “We buy a
lot at auction. Prices are spotty but
trending upward,” he said.
(When Doig employs the term
“we,” he said he means “the royal
we.” The name of his wife, Karen,
has always been associated with the
business, but, as Doig explained,
her time is occupied by her career
as a visiting nurse. The official
name of the business, Karen Alex-
ander Antiques, Inc., combines her
first name with his middle name,
Alexander—that’s why everybody
calls him Sandy. His first name is
John.)
Doig has connections with some
dealers in the South and sees evi-
dence of more activity there than in
the Northeast. “One of my best cus-
tomers is in Virginia. He sold fif-
teen to twenty chests in the lower to
midrange during the last year or so.
I’ve got two or three dealers in the
Washington, D.C., area, and they’re
buying.”
Doig is also connected to the
southern market though his son,
John, who operates a furniture res-
toration business in Beaufort, South
Carolina. About a year ago, John
moved his business from Litchfield,
Connecticut, to Beaufort and Doig
père
said he immediately picked
up business from Charleston and
Savannah dealers. “They’re far
more active than up here,” Doig
said.
He added that other dealers, such
as his friend Ian McKelvey, are
finding the South to be a more con-
genial market than the Northeast.
He said, “Ian McKelvey went down
to Texas with Mario Pollo to do a
show, and he said it’s a different
world. They sold over sixty pieces.”
Doig’s favorite pieces, he said,
are “renditions of formal forms in
native hardwoods—cherry, maple,
and—although less so—birch. I’ve
become especially fond of Con-
necticut River valley pieces includ-
ing more rural examples up in Ver-
mont and New Hampshire.” He has
always gravitated toward smaller
items—candlestands, small tables,
chairs, inlaid boxes, tea caddies.
“I’ve never done much with high-
boys and tall chests,” he noted.
He also has a fondness for Fed-
eral looking glasses. “In my career
I’ve done maybe a thousand or at
least more than five hundred. We
did fifty or sixty Federal mirrors a
year.” He’s particularly interested
in the reverse-painted tablets in
tabernacle mirrors. “I’d like to do a
book just on Federal glass panels,”
he said. “They’re as good as any
folk art.”
Doig said he no longer does the
volume he once did. “I’m seven-
ty-two and have kind of scaled
back. I used to do four to five times
what I do now.” The luxury of tak-
ing it easy is “thanks to my wife
who continues to work.”
Doig had no particular interest
in antiques when he was growing
up in Ridgewood, New Jersey. He
said, “My father was from Scotland
and my mother was from northern
Maine, and we had not an antique
in the house.” He got a degree in
economics from Bowdoin College
and an MBA from Rutgers Univer-
sity. He spent two years in the army
but did not have to go to Vietnam.
He was in a transportation unit.
“I did port studies,” he said. He
became a certified public accoun-
tant (CPA) and went to work in the
tax department of Price Waterhouse
in Manhattan.
His first interest in anything that
might qualify as “old stuff” devel-
oped when he and a Bowdoin friend
named Jack Gazlay bought a boat
together. “It was an eighty-foot
yacht that needed total restoration,”
Doig said. The purchase allowed
them to live in a way that most
New Yorkers can only dream about.
They docked at the 79th Street boat
basin on the West Side of Manhat-
tan. Doig said, “It was the cheapest
place you could live in New York.
The mooring was a hundred and
sixty dollars a month with electric
and two covered parking spaces.”
TWO COVERED PARKING
SPACES! The ultimate New York
City luxury.
As they moved up the corporate
ladder with increased travel and
responsibilities, Doig and Gazlay
sold the boat and bought an 1850s
house in Saddle River, New Jersey.
“Boats take a lot of time,” Doig
said.
That led to an unexpected
involvement with other “old stuff.”
The sellers of the house, who were
moving to Florida, asked if the
young men would mind keeping
the furniture for six months, which
they were delighted to do. “When
you move off a boat, you have no
furniture,” Doig said. “It was all
antiques.” The owners’ interior
décor served as a template for how
to furnish a house. “At garage sales
we replaced pieces one by one,” he
said.
Then Sandy married Karen. They
bought out the partner and discov-
ered that they liked working with
old furniture so much that they both
took Sotheby’s restoration course,
which was then run by John Stair.
Eventually Sandy changed jobs,
joining a Connecticut firm that
developed tax shelters based on his-
toric restoration tax credits awarded
for turning old buildings into resi-
dential complexes. The firm, for
example, developed two big former
mills in Norwich—Falls Mill and
Indian Leap Mill. The employment
switch prompted the Doigs’ move
to Somers. Sandy’s office was in
Farmington, and the family wanted
In the Trade
Sandy Doig, Somers, Connecticut
by Frank Donegan
“Prices are spotty
but trending
upward.”
Sandy Doig in his basement workshop. In good weather he
works in his barn. He thinks the two-drawer stand is from the
south shore of Massachusetts. “It has the thinner stock that
they use there.” He’s asking $450 for it. “Eight years ago it
would have been nine hundred,” he said.
This one-drawer cherry bowfront console table with nice
inlay was on hold when we visited.
Inlay on the
cherry console
table. “This is
exactly the type
of thing I love,”
he said.
“This is the wildest Federal can-
dlestand you’ll ever see,” Doig
said. It’s cherry with thin fins
resembling miniature Federal
backsplashes that protrude from
the rod-like standard. It’s priced
at $550.
Detail of the cherry candlestand.
Pair of English mahogany can-
dlesticks, $325. Back in the
1990s, nice pairs of sticks like
these, with period bobeches, sold
for hundreds of dollars more.
The large blue Staffordshire warming plate is marked
“Copeland & Garrett,” which dates it to between 1833
and 1847. It’s 22" long and $275. “It’s the biggest I’ve ever
seen,” Doig said.