Vintage Old Money Credenza Ideas

Ask for a credenza in an antiques barn and someone will point you to the mid-century corner. The older cases are labelled sideboard, buffet or server. The searches agree. People chasing this look type vintage sideboard buffet, a maker such as Thomasville, or a timber such as oak or mahogany, and hardly anyone types the word at the top of this page. So begin where they begin, with the sideboards and buffet cabinets, and judge every one of them by what it is made of.

Vintage old money credenza photos, two black and two brown

Two of the four rooms here use a long black case. In a living room, a 69 inch cabinet carries a pale marble disc on a stand, with a cast aluminum footed boat nearby, and nothing crowds it. Across the leather seating in another, eighty inches of black does the work a bookcase would do in a smaller house. Black belongs here more than people assume. Victorian cabinetmakers ebonized cheaper woods so they would pass for ebony, and a dark painted case beneath a brown leather sofa is a descendant of that habit rather than a modern intrusion. If your walls already run warm, start with the black sideboards.

The other two are brown, and both stand in dining rooms, which is where the form began. A 90 inch buffet sits behind a mango wood extension table and elm chairs. A 66 inch one faces a long Positano table across linen seats. Neither cabinet matches its table. The wood is close in depth and different in grain, which is how an inherited dining room looks after three generations of buying one piece at a time. Read the vintage old money dining room furniture that way and stop hunting for a matched set.

Timber is the fastest way to place a piece. Oak, quarter sawn with that silvery ray fleck, belongs to the first decades of the last century and reads heavy, honest, slightly rural. Mahogany is the city cousin, red underneath and usually veneered over a plainer carcass. Carved fronts and curved legs signal French taste, and the rounded waterfall edges of the 1930s are the era with the fastest climbing searches this year, along with dark wood generally. Treat any vintage old money credenza inspiration you save as a timber question first. The Dark Luxury Lookbook rewards the same lens.

Inside the vintage old money credenza gallery, the wall stays empty

A sideboard with a hutch, or with a mirror back, is popular in the searches and hard on most rooms. The hutch adds three or four feet of height and turns a low horizontal into a wall of furniture, and under a ceiling of nine feet or less it steals the place a painting should hang. Every case in this set is a plain low box, with the wall above handed to art or to nothing at all. If you love a mirror back, give it a tall room and a window opposite so it doubles daylight rather than doubling clutter. Closed, quiet fronts like the ones among the credenza cabinets are the safer buy.

Lamps on the top, not ornaments

The surest signal of old money on a sideboard is a pair of lamps, each set in from the end, shades a touch wider than feels right. Their light rakes across the top and finds the grain or the paint in a way a ceiling fixture never manages, and it gives a dining room a second, lower layer of light for the end of a meal. Between the lamps keep one thing only: a bowl, a tray of glasses, a single sculpture. Dark figured wood carries this better than pale, which is why the walnut sideboards glow where a bleached oak top simply goes grey after dark.

Size it the way a dining room asks. Leave roughly three feet between the cabinet and the back of the nearest chair so someone can serve from it, and let the case run about two thirds the length of the table rather than the whole wall. In most vintage old money credenza pictures the cabinet is slightly short for its wall, with a chair or a small table beside it, and that gap is part of why the rooms look lived in. Other rooms and other ages are covered under credenza ideas, while the vintage old money credenza ideas on this page stay with the older, heavier case.

Resist restoring the life out of it. A stripped and sprayed top loses the faint rings, the softened corners and the slight darkening around each handle that tell you a family used it. Clean it, wax it, fix the runners, and stop. Nothing in an old money room looks newly finished.