Last week closed a run of editions on Central African court art. This week the terrain changes completely, from carved tribal sculpture to twentieth-century design workshops, from a single block of wood to engineered plywood, veneer and laminate. The discipline stays the same. Read the material before the label, read the label before the price, and read the wear before either. Denmark and Sweden built an export industry out of a small number of workshops and a rotating cast of independent designers; Belgium, less famous internationally but no less ambitious, built its own around Kortrijk. Both produced furniture using teak and rosewood that still turns up weekly in flea markets, estate sales and design auctions, mostly without ceremony and often without its original label. This edition reads the sideboard as the emblematic object of the category, five red flags to check before buying, the workshops behind the best-known names, what a maker's mark can and cannot prove, the legal weight rosewood carries today, and a reader question about a twenty-five euro flea market find.

No object carries the look of this period better than the long, low sideboard, and none is easier to misjudge. Behind a teak or rosewood veneer front sits a construction almost never solid: blockboard or plywood carcasses, book-matched veneer laid for figure rather than strength, sliding or tambour doors running on wooden runners that wear predictably with age, and a fitted interior of shelves, a cutlery tray or a small bar compartment behind one of the doors. None of that is a shortcut taken at the expense of quality. It is exactly how a well-engineered mid-century sideboard was supposed to be built, by Belgian and Scandinavian workshops alike, and a solid, unveneered equivalent from this period is the rarer and often the less well-designed object of the two.

Two things follow from that. First, judging a sideboard by its veneer alone tells you almost nothing about its quality or its maker; the tell sits in the carcass construction, the runners, the back panel and the underside, not in the front. Second, because the silhouette (long, low, tapered legs, a plain rectangular front) was produced by dozens of workshops across two countries at once, a sideboard with no legible mark or model number is, by default, an anonymous good piece of furniture rather than a bad one. It only becomes something else, and something worth a different price, once a mark, a catalogue match or a documented construction detail ties it to a specific workshop.

The teak in a genuine 1950s or 60s piece is not quite the same material as the teak sold today. Mid-century workshops worked almost exclusively with old-growth teak, dense, slow-grown timber with a richer grain and a deeper natural lustre than the faster-grown, plantation-sourced teak that dominates the market now. Decades of demand thinned out the old-growth supply, and by the 1990s the material itself had changed. It is one more reason an honest vintage piece, even an unmarked one, is not simply an old version of what you can buy new; the wood in your hands genuinely does not grow the same way anymore.

Fritz Hansen is the name most collectors reach for first. The company traces back to 1872, when the cabinet maker Fritz Hansen took out a trade licence in Copenhagen, and the technical leap came under his son Christian Hansen, who pioneered steam-bending and laminated wood in the early twentieth century, work that fed directly into the firm's postwar output of moulded plywood seating. The names collectors chase today mostly date from the 1940s and 50s: Hans Wegner's China Chair (1944), Arne Jacobsen's Ant (1952) and Series 7 (1955) chairs, and the Egg and Swan chairs Jacobsen designed in 1958 for the SAS Royal Hotel. In 1979 the Hansen family sold a majority stake to an outside holding company, a useful marker in itself for dating anything with a family-era history attached to it. Smaller Danish workshops and cabinetmakers, PP Møbler among them, built to designers' specifications on a more artisanal scale, with simpler marks, a stamped or branded name, sometimes a production number, and none of the elaborate anti-counterfeiting systems a larger manufacturer later needed.

Belgium's answer sits in Kortrijk. De Coene Frères was founded there in 1905 by Joseph François De Coene with his brother Adolf and two brothers-in-law, Arthur Deleu and Marcel Brunein, and grew by the interwar years into a serious industrial workshop employing close to three thousand people, specialising in serial production using laminated wood and showing work at exhibitions in Milan, Paris, Brussels and Roubaix. Joseph De Coene also ran a genuine design salon, weekly "Monday Tables" from 1922 to 1940 that drew in figures like Henry van de Velde, Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe. After the war the firm continued as Kortrijkse Kunstwerkstede Gebroeders De Coene, carrying its serial, laminated-wood approach into the postwar decades this edition covers. Alfred Hendrickx belongs in the same sentence, working chiefly for the manufacturer Belform; his designs were first shown publicly at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair, placing his best-known model lines (T3, T4, S6-L, Model 500) in the 1958 to 1962 window, built from walnut, sycamore and cherry with brass hardware and black lacquer finishes.

One complication belongs here too. Fritz Hansen still manufactures several of these designs today under formal licence from the designers' estates. Upholstered pieces made since 2006 carry a "Republic of Fritz Hansen" tag, colour-coded by era, red before 2010, dark brown from 2011 to 2019, black-and-white from 2020 onward, each with a unique ID number and a thread that only shows up under the company's own verification pen. A chair bought new last year through an authorised dealer is completely genuine Fritz Hansen production; it is simply not vintage, and should never be sold as such. That is a different object again from an unlicensed copy carrying no legitimate claim to the designer's name at all, whatever the listing photo suggests. Vintage, licensed reissue and unlicensed copy are three separate questions, and a seller who stays vague about which one applies is usually vague on purpose.

Read the bands as orientation, not a price list. An honest, unmarked teak or rosewood-look sideboard, well made but with no traceable workshop behind it, sits at the flea-market and general estate-sale end of the market: solid furniture priced as furniture. The same physical object, once it carries a legible manufacturer's stamp and a model number matched to a published Belform, De Coene or Fritz Hansen catalogue, moves into a different pricing conversation entirely, set by specialist dealers, design fairs and the design and decorative arts departments of houses like Bonhams and Christie's, or by platforms like Catawiki where verified mid-century design has its own dedicated audience.

Condition and originality act as a multiplier on top of attribution. An unrestored piece with original finish, original hardware and, on upholstered furniture, original foam intact will consistently outperform an equivalent piece that has been refinished or reupholstered, even under the same maker's name. A refinish is not a disaster and does not erase an attribution, but it is a fact that belongs in the price and the description, not something a buyer discovers later. Most people who bring home an unmarked sideboard because they liked the shape are not making a mistake. Most people who pay design-fair prices for a piece with no attribution to back it up usually are.

A furniture analysis on AntiqBot follows the same tracks as this edition, in order. First, the wood: grain and figure over colour, checked for signs of staining or refinishing. Second, construction and hardware: carcass type, joinery, screw type and consistency of wear across the whole piece, inside and out. Third, any mark or label present, or conspicuously absent, cross-referenced against published workshop and designer catalogues where a match is possible. Where a photo cannot show what is needed, underneath a seat, inside a drawer, the back of a panel, we say so and ask for it rather than guessing. The result comes back on the same five-tier scale used across every AntiqBot analysis, from AUTHENTIC to NOT AUTHENTIC, with the reasoning attached and the limits of what a photograph can prove clearly stated.

"I picked up a dark wood sideboard at a flea market for twenty-five euro. No label anywhere, but the shape looks exactly like the teak sideboards I see online for hundreds of euro. Did I score, or is it worth what I paid for it?"

At twenty-five euro you have not lost anything either way, and the honest starting point is that most unmarked sideboards of this silhouette are exactly what they look like: solid, well-made furniture from the period or a later reproduction of it, without a traceable name behind them. Whether yours is more than that gets decided by the same checks as always. Look at the grain rather than the colour to judge the wood. Turn it over and check the back panel, the underside and inside the drawers for a stamp, a label, or a clean patch where one used to be. Look at the screws wherever original hardware would logically survive, and compare the wear inside the drawers against the wear on the outside.

Then do it properly. Photograph the piece in even daylight from the front, the back, the underside and inside every drawer, with close-ups of anywhere a mark could sit. Run it through an AntiqBot analysis for a documented read on what it most likely is and what it is reasonably worth. Send your question to info@antiqbot.com.

Next week in AntiqBot Weekly #23 we turn to a new category, back at the usual desk with a fresh object and five new checks to test it against.