Object Description
A fabulous polychromed Green lacquered and gilt japanned cocktail cabinet-on-stand, retailed by Harrods and bearing their ivorine label, circa 1940’s in date.
The two-door cabinet is decorated in the chinoiserie taste with figures and pagodas in a mountainous landscape to the front and features storks. It opens to a shelved interior, with a pull out drink’s server, the giltwood stand is superbly carved in the Chippendale taste with a decorative carved frieze centred with a shell crest. The cabinet is raised on cabriole legs that terminate in pad feet.
The cabinet bears an ivorine Harrods label and a Harvey Nicol’s & Co Ltd Depository, Bournemouth, paper label.
Add some pizzazz to you home with this amazing cocktail cabinet.
Condition
This unique cabinet is in excellent condition and has been well cared for. Please see photographs to confirm condition.
Dimensions in cm:
Height 149.5 cm x Width 80 cm x Depth 50 cm
Dimensions in inches:
Height 4 foot, 11 inches x Width 2 foot, 7 inches x Depth 1 foot, 8 inches
Harrods founder Charles Henry Harrod first established his business in 1824, aged 25. The business was located south of the River Thames in Southwark. The premises were located at 228 Borough High Street.
He ran this business, variously listed as a draper, mercer and a haberdasher, certainly until 1831. During 1825 the business was listed as ‘Harrod and Wicking, Linen Drapers, Retail’, but this partnership was dissolved at the end of that year. His first grocery business appears to be as ‘Harrod & Co.Grocers’ at 163 Upper Whitecross Street, Clerkenwell, E.C.1., in 1832. In 1834 in London’s East End, he established a wholesale grocery in Stepney, at 4, Cable Street, with a special interest in tea.
In 1849, to escape the vice of the inner city and to capitalise on trade to the Great Exhibition of 1851 in nearby Hyde Park, Harrod took over a small shop in the district of Brompton, on the site of the current store. Beginning in a single room employing two assistants and a messenger boy, Harrod’s son Charles Digby Harrod built the business into a thriving retail operation selling medicines, perfumes, stationery, fruit and vegetables. Harrods rapidly expanded, acquired the adjoining buildings, and employed one hundred people by 1880.
However, the store’s booming fortunes were reversed in early December 1883, when it burnt to the ground. Remarkably, in view of this calamity, Charles Harrod fulfilled all of his commitments to his customers to make Christmas deliveries that year—and made a record profit in the process. In short order, a new building was built on the same site, and soon Harrods extended credit for the first time to its best customers, among them Oscar Wilde,Lillie Langtry, Ellen Terry, Charlie Chaplin, Noël Coward, Gertrude Lawrence, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, Sigmund Freud, A. A. Milne, and many members of the British Royal Family.
On Wednesday, 16 November 1898, Harrods debuted England’s first “moving staircase” (escalator) in their Brompton Road stores; the device was actually a woven leather conveyor belt-like unit with a wood and “silver plate-glass” balustrade. Nervous customers were offered brandy at the top to revive them after their ‘ordeal’. The department store was purchased by the Fayed brothers in 1985.
In 2010 Harrods was sold to Qutar Holdings.
Harrods was the holder of royal warrants from 1910 till 2000 from the following:
* Queen Elizabeth II (Provisions and Household Goods)
* The Duke of Edinburgh (Outfitters)
* The Prince of Wales (Outfitters and Saddlers)
* The late Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother (China and Glass)
The store occupies a 5-acre (20,000 m2) site and has over one million square feet (90,000 m2) of selling space in over 330 departments making it the biggest department store in Europe.
The UK’s second-biggest shop, Selfridges, Oxford Street, is a little over half the size with 540,000 square feet (50,000 m2) of selling space, while the third largest, Allders of Croydon had 500,000 square feet (46,000 m2) of retail space.
By comparison Europe’s second-largest department store the KaDeWe in Berlin has a retail space of 650,000 square feet (60,000 m2).
Thomas Chippendale
(1718 – 1779) was a London cabinet-maker and furniture designer in the mid-Georgian, English Rococo, and Neoclassical styles.
In 1754 he published a book of his designs, titled The Gentleman and Cabinet Maker’s Director. The designs are regarded as reflecting the current London fashion for furniture for that period and were used by other cabinet makers outside London. The Director shows four main styles: 1. English with deep carving, 2. elaborate French rococo in the style of Louis XV furniture, 3. Chinese style with latticework and lacquer, and 4. Gothic with pointed arches, quatrefoils and fret-worked legs.
Chippendale was much more than just a cabinet maker, he was an interior designer who advised on soft furnishings and even the colour a room should be painted. Chippendale often took on large-scale commissions from aristocratic clients. Twenty-six of these commissions have been identified.
Our reference: A5076