Vintage Pair Flame Mahogany Sideboards Retailed By Harrods Late 20th C

This is a fabulous Vintage pair of Regency Revival flame mahogany breakfront sideboards, bought at great expense from Harrods and dating from the second half of the 20th Century,

They are made of stunning  flame mahogany crossbanded in satin wood with boxwood line inlaid decoration. They each have four drawers over cupboards and are raised on bracket feet.

The amazing craftsmanship that has gone into this elegant pair is immediately obvious, the lovely warm tones and grain of the flame mahogany ensuring the sideboards are shown off to perfection.

Condition:

In excellent condition having been beautifully cleaned, polished and waxed in our workshops, please see photos for confirmation.
 

Dimensions in cm:

Height 92 x Width 168 x Depth 47.5

Dimensions in inches:

Height 3 foot x Width 5 foot, 6 inches x Depth 1 foot, 7 inches

Flame Mahogany

Thomas Sheraton - 18th century furniture designer, once characterized mahogany as "best suited to furniture where strength is demanded as well as a wood that works up easily, has a beautiful figure and polishes so well that it is an ornament to any room in which it may be placed." Matching his words to his work, Sheraton designed much mahogany furniture. The qualities that impressed Sheraton are particularly evident in a distinctive pattern of wood called "flame mahogany."

The flame figure in the wood is revealed by slicing through the face of the branch at the point where it joins another element of the tree.

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).