1970 Paul Evans Coffee Table
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GUEST:
This is a Paul Evans coffee table that I inherited from my grandparents a couple of years ago. As far as I know, it's made of cast bronze. My grandfather was a dentist. They had six kids. So they put an addition on their house in, like, the late '60s, early '70s, and hired an interior designer to decorate the whole place. And this was part of that designer's choices. Growing up with it, it always stuck out as sort of a unique piece of the room. Their old cat used to always, like, creep through there, and at Christmastime, my grandma would put a, a Christmas manger inside, in the middle. A lot of fond memories of my childhood around this table.
APPRAISER:
This was a pretty avant-garde thing to buy and furnish your home with in the early '70s. In fact, we know that this table was made in 1970 because it's signed "P.E.," for Paul Evans, "'70."
GUEST:
Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER:
It's not a bronze table.
GUEST:
Okay.
APPRAISER:
But it has a bronze color to it. What Paul Evans did was, you get a steel base, you put resin on top, and then you shoot it with a bronze dust, uh...
GUEST:
And did that give every piece sort of a unique finish?
APPRAISER:
Exactly-- exactly.
GUEST:
Huh.
APPRAISER:
So not something like bronze, which is just cast, and the same thing is turned out over and over and over again.
GUEST:
Yeah.
APPRAISER:
So each one is a little different. Paul Evans worked out of New Hope, Pennsylvania.
GUEST:
Okay.
APPRAISER:
And he was part of a studio movement in the '60s and '70s. They didn't just build furniture, they considered themselves artists.
GUEST:
Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER:
Hence they were signing their pieces and dating their pieces. He had great acclaim through the '70s, and then by the 1980s, he falls out of favor style-wise, and then recently, they've become very, very popular. This is a piece of Brutalist furniture, and it's the kind of thing that, it's in your face. It's very aggressive, um...
GUEST:
Yeah, definitely a statement piece for the room.
APPRAISER:
Yes. And it's, like, you love it or you hate it. For me, this furniture, it grows on you. So, any idea of its value at all?
GUEST:
I did see some search results for some auctions where it was selling for $5,000 to $8,000 range.
APPRAISER:
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. I was going to say $5,000 to $7,000...
GUEST:
Okay.
APPRAISER:
...because I'm an auctioneer and I'm conservative.
GUEST:
Great.
APPRAISER:
That is bingo, right where this table would be.
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