Heywood you look at this!

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Same coffee table Versatronic

That is the same coffee table that I have in the rec room. My brother's kids kept treating it like a merry go round - one would get onto it and the other would spin it around. A while back, my partner got some really great vintage furniture from his aunt. I had the bases refinished to match the Heywood Wakefield and the tops re-silvered (mirrors). It's the gayest living room in the neighborhood. The sofa and chairs were estate sale finds and recovered in vintage fabric.

9-19-2006-20-15-40--estatesale_gary.jpg
 
Hi Greg

Yes, the radios all work.

Unlike Robert, I'm not talented enough to know or learn how to fix them myself. However, I discovered that St. Louis has an antique radio club called ARCH (Antique Radio Collectors & Historians). So I popped in on one of their meetings, and rubbed elbows afterward until I found a retired guy who liked to do radio restorations for fun and supplemental income. He fixed radios and TV's for a living all his life, and in his retirement, he spent his time restoring radios, TVs, and console Hi Fi sets. He collected them at estate sales, etc. He had a huge basement below his ranch house, and the basement was completely full of steel shelving crammed with radios, all of which he had restored to mint condition. I don't know how he did it, especially with the plastic bakelite ones, because he did NOT paint them like most people do. Later I heard that he passed away, and I always wondered if his wife kept his collection.
 
Absolutely love that pink living room!

You have a brilliant mind for decorating. Maybe I'm just weird, but it gives me the same sense of delight and amusement I get from the sort of pissy elegant women who would wear power red fingernails and lipstick and bellow, "Don't f#$% with me fellas! This ain't my first time at the rodeo."
 
Oh my God

This is now officially my favorite thread of all time. Who knew that so many people here had such beautifully done midcentury homes? I just love looking at these works of art! Fantastic!
 
Jason, that's actually a "Vibrasonic" - as far as I can tell, it's a reverb chamber. The idea is that you can use it when listening to records to give it more of a "concert hall" feel.

I don't use it much, but it can be fun at times. The only bad thing is that sometimes it turns on when you are listening to news or something (I think there may be a short in there somewhere)

There's also a third channel speaker in the center, but I don't like it: I don't know if it's blown or what, but it muddies things up too much for my taste.

But all in all, it's a great stereo. I use the tape input for my satelite radio/iTunes, and it sounds magnificent.
 
Very interesting thread; thanks Greg. I have two Heywood Wakefield bedroom sets, along with coffee tables, endtables, nightstands, etc., which I may be selling in the near future. Glad to see that there is so much interest in this furniture.
 
It's all beautiful.

I'd actually never heard of the brand before, and I'm forty, and lived in New York (and snooped around) furniture stores all my life!

I most definitely think you would get top dollar if you put them on the market....
 
One more when I get time

I have one last room of Heywood Wakefield furniture to post but I don't know when I'll get around to it. I think you Heywood Wakefield fans will find it very interesting.
 
The other Heywood

Not so much a tease as not wanting this thread to get archived before I get a change to post one or two more pictures.

I'll tell you one thing, the furniture is not blonde.
 
Versatronic and all other HW experts,

I'm glad you said that. An aquaintance of mine recent bought what looks to me like a mahogany dining room table and I thought he said it was a Heywood-Wakefield. I had never heard of the manufacturer, and it was long before this thread was started. When this thread was first started, I thought I would see the table here, but the pics here are so modern, and this table is so traditional and formal that I thought I must have heard it wrong.

I've been calling the stuff Wakefield-Poole. Those of you who know that one can stop laughing now...

Meanwhile, while cleaning out my grandmother's house, I realized that her table was about an exact match of the one my friend has. I went over the table with a fine tooth comb but can find no manufacturer's mark on it at all.

What markings are there on the furniture that show it is a HW, like a stamp, sticker, burned in brand in a drawer?
 
Peter

Almost all HW is stamped inside the drawers, or on the back, etc.

There are exceptions to this.

Post a picture and we can see if we can match it up in some of the reference materials I have.....
 
Some info

The Heywood Wakefield company can be traced back to 1897, so obviously they made a lot of traditional furniture before they started designing "modern" furniture. You can commonly find old baby buggies on eBay, for instance. So, not all HW furniture looks like the kind of stylized furniture in this thread. The vast majority of interest in HW furniture these days is in their modern furniture lines. But they did make good quality traditional furniture before they started making modern furniture.

Usually each piece has a burned in marking of HW with a Eagle symbol.

Because HW became so popular, a lot of companies started making knock-offs. I have an example of a knock-off and it's almost a dead ringer for the original. The sure-bet way, if there are no markings to tell an original from a knock-off is the finish. Nobody could duplicate the HW finishes.

Around 60, 61, HW started moving into a different design phase. They started making "danish modern" styled furniture and used dark finishes. They also started making furniture that looked more like Paul McCobb and George Nelson designs, more angular than streamlined. And the finishes had names like Sable. I had a sable piece. This period of Wakefield is not very popular among HW collectors, though.

A lady wrote a HW book about this period a couple years ago. I believe it was called Heywood Wakefield, Danish Modern and Beyond, or something close to that. The cover shows a danish modern style living room set and I own that set and was going to post it here when I got a chance.

I hope this info helps you out a bit.
 

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