TWO years ago, Apter- Fredericks, one of the capital’s leading dealers in the finest English furniture (a diminishing band), closed the Fulham Road galleries it had occupied since Alfred Fredericks founded the business in 1946. The firm, still family run, now operates entirely online (www.apter-fredericks.com), except when conditions permit the more traditional business model of participation in the Masterpiece fair in London and New York’s Winter Antiques Show. Apter-Fredericks’s pride was that a client could fully furnish a house from its stock, but the online version no longer needed the three floors in Chelsea, which led to a January sale at Christie’s.
The business has been in the hands of Harry and Guy Apter, grandsons of Alfred and born to the trade, for a good number of years. At the age of 21, their father, Bernard, wed Claire Fredericks and joined her father in A. Fredericks Chelsea. Back then, there were 14 furniture dealers cheek by jowl on the Brown Mile, as that stretch of the Fulham Road was known, and it was very much a matter of ‘pile ’em high and sell to the trade’. Later, the business courted private buyers, but, paradoxically, the success of antiques fairs—Harry was a founder of Masterpiece—made it more difficult for shopkeepers, as some overseas clients would only visit them at a fair.
In the post-war decades, there were numerous country-house contents sales around the country, if not yet on the scale reached in the 1970s, and almost every local estate agent had its own saleroom. However, Harry was seven and a half before he could persuade his father and grandfather to take him on a buying trip. He signed on full time after leaving school and has been with the firm ever since.
Denne historien er fra February 17, 2021-utgaven av Country Life UK.
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Denne historien er fra February 17, 2021-utgaven av Country Life UK.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
