Longtime readers to this site know that much of the furniture (especially in the great room) was picked up from local auction houses.
Now that we have what we need, I rarely scroll through auction offerings, but last year around this time I was in the market for some sort of drawer storage for my office. I checked the usual online retailers, but any decent tables/desks with multiple drawers cost several hundred dollars and required a lot of assembly work. As luck would have it, a couple of local houses had a few options in their June catalogs. I managed to snag the one I liked the most–a walnut Davenport desk from the mid-1800s. All I then had to do was find time to drive up to Alameda and pick it up.
A year later I’m still in love with it! So useful, with drawers just the right size, an upper storage under-the-desk bit great for random craft supplies, and thanks to some casters I found at our local Ace Hardware, it is quite mobile.
Best of all, tucked inside the wee top drawer was a receipt from a shop in in Southwold, England, dated March 25, 1933. Seems someone in Surrey bought the desk, and then sometime in the last 90 years it made its way to California.
