Chiffonier sideboard

This sideboard was made in around 1870 and it features a range of New Zealand timbers including kahikitea, puriri, rimu, totara and mangeao. It has a seven-sided front with beaded decoration on the three cupboard doors, and three drawers with glass knobs. The back has an inset mirror and two shelves either side held up by turned rods. The back is flat with cast iron carrying handles, and the top board is cut in curves around knots in the timber. The two outer door panels are 'book matched' to display reversed graining.

Historian and furniture restorer William Cottrell suggests in Furniture of the New Zealand Colonial Era that the sideboard's 'quirky and ungainly appearance give it all the hallmarks of a piece that had been made from memory by a craftsman with an untrained eye' (Cottrell, 108). Some of the decorative elements align closely with nineteenth-century German design, and the date of 1870 coincides with the second period of German settlement in Nelson, where the sideboard was found.

Reference

Cottrell, William. 2006. Furniture of the New Zealand Colonial Era, An Illustrated History 1830-1900. Auckland: Reed.