BURBANK, Calif.—An unassembled dresser by low-cost furniture retailer IKEA was mistakenly identified as an early work by legendary Swiss-French designer and architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris (commonly known as Le Corbusier) and appraised on the “Antiques Roadshow” for a jaw-dropping $2 million as a conservative auction estimate, with the appraiser adding that “$3 million would be a very reasonable value for insurance purposes.”
The appraiser, James H. Smith, of the eponymous New York City–based furniture and antiques firm, at first appeared skeptical when evaluating the item—but not because he thought the item was mass produced (despite the obvious particleboard, cam locks, nuts, and dowels). He told the guest, Sheryl Wood, 37, that in his nearly 50 years in the antique furniture world, including 23 on the “Roadshow,” he had never seen anything like it in a showroom or at auction, so he thought it might be a fake. But after consulting with three of his colleagues—all of whom had also never seen anything like it in their combined 124 years of experience—they concluded that it must be a unique prototype by Le Corbusier. Smith then quickly sketched on a napkin what the dresser, fully assembled, would probably look like.
A calm Wood was patient and stood off to the side as Smith evaluated the many pieces. When asked by Smith where she got the dresser and how much she paid, she matter-of-factly replied, “Online for maybe $200, including shipping.” The respected appraiser then asked if she had any documentation that might establish provenance. Wood presented him with an instruction manual, which nearly brought him to tears, partly because his earlier sketch of a four-drawer dresser had been a fairly good representation of the illustration of the six-drawer dresser on the manual’s cover. He struggled, however, to pronounce the design’s apparent name, “Malm,” also on the cover, saying it a handful of ways, before painstakingly cross-checking all the pieces with those listed. His countenance momentarily dropped as he noted that one of the dowels was missing. But his face then brightened, and he observed that because of today’s ultra-precise manufacturing technology and quality control, modern mass-produced furniture would never have a missing piece, so the missing dowel proved that it must be a Le Corbusier prototype.
Smith asked Wood if she’d ever had the item appraised. Grinning like a Cheshire cat, she said no and that it didn’t matter what it was worth, she liked it and was going to keep it. Barely able to contain himself and choking up, he then gave his astounding estimate of its value, finishing by saying that it was “by far the most important and most valuable item he’d ever appraised” and that he felt Le Corbusier would likely have had great success with the Malm dresser, though maybe not as a mass-produced item.
