Large 18th C French Buffet Armoire or Display Cabinet

Price on request

Big, Bold & Beautifully undressed.

Meet our new arrival: an 18th-century French buffet armoire à deux corps — a very elegant way of saying two magnificent cupboards stacked into one towering showpiece, the upper simply lifting off the lower so it can slip through your doorways without a single dramatic scene!

Crowning the whole affair is a glorious domed bonnet — a "blown gable with centre console," (should you wish to say it at dinner parties) — with a keystone block at its peak and a little procession of carved blocks marching along the arch. Beneath it, tall arched panel doors that open to reveal... well, we'll get to that.

A word on her passport: her provenance
We found her in France, and French she may well be — the Alsace has long produced tall pine armoires cut from exactly this cloth. But the softwood body and the ghost of original blue paint hiding in the grain hint at a more well-travelled tale, one with a distinctly Scandinavian Baroque accent. Is she French? Is she Nordic? Cherie, the most fascinating guests never reveal quite everything.

Undressed to impress
She arrived to us in a tired coat of dirty dark brown. We spent hours hand-sanding her back to the bone — and what a reveal: honeyed pine, silvery weathering, and those seductive flashes of old blue where former lives peek through. Inside, we've painted her a deep brique red, so every swing of the doors delivers a gasp of colour. Her back tells the truth of her years, too: hand-pegged panelled boards and forged pin hinges, all made by hand, all still holding court after some 250 winters.

The backstory, worn lightly
Cabinets like this were the crown jewel of a prosperous farmhouse or a bourgeois salon — the keeper of the good porcelains or linens, the trousseau, the family's finest textiles, and now and then a dowry gift for a marriage. Despite the "armoire" title, she never held a single coat: this was always a piece for display and treasured storage. Pine was the honest, everyday timber of the north, almost always dressed in paint — grained, marbled, or a bold solid blue. To strip her back to this, is simply to let the wood do the talking.

And her age? Somewhere in the second half of the 18th century — call it 1770 to 1800, with a silhouette that stayed fashionably in vogue into the early 1800s.

The practical particulars
Grand rather undersells it: 276 cm / 108.7" tall. Mind your ceilings; reward your walls.
Full glory: H 276 × W 153 × D 70 cm (108.7 × 60.2 × 27.6")
Upper corps: W 140 × D 42 cm (55.1 × 16.5")
Splits neatly in two for a civilised delivery.

She isn't furniture. She's an entrance — now looking for a room brave enough to hold her.

Please contact us for a quote