ALTERNATIVE ASSETS
Investors are raising US$100 million to buy unloved antiques
For an optimistic few, the currently drab market represents a once-in-a-lifetime chance to buy low and sell high
THE term "brown furniture" encompasses multiple centuries' worth of fine antiques in hundreds of styles from dozens of countries. Understandably, antique dealers hate it.
And yet the term has stuck, not least because it does a neat job of capturing how drab the antique market's been for the last decade.
"I purchased a table the other day that I would have had to pay US$50,000 for 20 years ago," says Clinton Howell, the president of the Art and Antique Dealers League of America and president of his eponymous New York store. "I bought it for US$4,000."
