"We don’t get to buy our stuff so easy now. The rich people have got to know the value of antique furniture and buy them and then do not sell."

This from a woman, who together with her husband, is big timer in the antique furniture buying and selling business. They, at the beginning, and later their agents, would scour villages and hamlets and, particularly, ancient walauwes and mahagederas and buy old furniture and items such as lamps and old light shades from these people. I shudder to think of the prices certain pieces may have been sold for. You could condemn a chair for a shaky leg, snapped rattan, shabby appearance and pay a piffle not making it known you had recognized it as from the Dutch period with its VOC symbol. The poor sellers wanted the money and, very probably, the said chair was thrown aside in a dark corner of the store room. This definitely was the case until say, two decades ago when even the villager got wind of the value of antique furniture. The nouveau riche jumped the bandwagon. Their noses are trained to smell profitable propositions, otherwise how did they get rich without inheriting much? So they bought antique furniture and realized they had made a good deal since furniture seems to appreciate even more than land. And they don’t sell what they bought. Hence the antique furniture entrepreneur’s lament.

Worth multiplies itself

A Galle cupboard with a mite of ebony decoration, ideal for storing household linen, was Rs 3,000 or thereabouts twenty years ago. This was the selling price in Colombo at the frequent sales at the Wendt. It would have been cheaper in the Ambalangoda antique shops and even cheaper in Galle itself. The price now ranges from around Rs125,000 to more.

I was in Ambalangoda very recently and accompanied an antiques-crazy son scouring the shops of the area. They are, most of them, large with even three floors, and stacked with all sorts of furniture and furnishings ranging from single chairs, tables, sofas, Galle cupboards, pettagamas, writing desks and decorative items such as ancient lamps, cartwheels and nutcrackers and chunam boxes.

This is a ritual with this expat son. I shudder each time he says he is making his pilgrimage to Ambalangoda because he may, meager finances willing, have a piece of furniture bought and delivered to my small flat. This time around he was completely sans extra spending money and I was relieved. I realized however how short sighted I am: antique furniture is an investment the value of which appreciates much more than money deposited to collect interest.

He’s infected me with his interest – not to the extent of infecting me with his craze – for antique furniture which originally, before he educated me on the beauty of these ancient pieces, with their colonial influence, meant nothing to me, or mere dust gatherers. Philistine me!

For his extended essay of original research as part requirement of the International Baccalaureate Exam, he selected the colonial influence on furniture. I wondered whether he could gather enough material to meet the word extent stipulated. Imagine my surprise as he was forced to pare down the influence, having so much material to write on emerging as his research progressed. Finally he wrote on the Dutch colonizer’s influence on chairs and beds.

A woman who used to exhibit antique furniture and other household items at the Wendt even earned the sobriquet of ‘Other Mother’ from me since when my son fell in love with an item I was prevented from bargaining. He was on her side!! With hindsight I wonblame him. He knew, like the sellers knew, that he was in the long run making a bargain.

A prosperous couple

So this time I gazed with more interest and mounting surprise as the woman I mentioned, with her husband, mentioned prices of items she had. A chair of close to three hundred years, yes, even more aged, could fetch a million rupees. Hence their business is lucrative. They export too and are on Internet. Her children are being educated in a Colombo international school with them running two homes – a weekday residence in Colombo and weekends back to Ambalangoda. She is already making enquiries for the best universities in the US and Britain for her eldest son. Good for them!! Good for our country!! They have certainly worked hard, had keen noses for good pieces of furniture and are now prospering.

I enquired whether the prevalent slump in tourism affected them. Very slightly or negligibly she said. Her clientele being up-market, was a fraction of tourist influx to the country. Her steady income comes from expatriate foreigners resident in Sri Lanka; those who had lived here; and buyers via Internet. The nouveau riche who now eat into her buying market, may also be clients of hers. Here however, they may be going to source, bypassing the middle man. There surely is still plenty to buy from village homes and rural walauwes.

It’s like you will always be able to buy a genuine, meaning old and imported from India, patiya or palakka necklace in a Kandy jewellery shop because possessors of these items hit bad patches, have declining incomes and so sell their antique jewellery. It is a sad business even looking at these items since one guesses they are family heirlooms now sold to keep body and soul together by these prosperous people reduced to penury.