What Is Well-Made Furniture Actually Worth?

Jeremy Bilotti and David Rosenwasser source, refurbish, and sell rare and collectible furniture through Rarify, the Philadelphia-based company they co-founded in 2021. Its inaugural exhibition, “Skidmore, Owings and Merrill: Hidden Furniture Masterpieces 1950-1991”—a largely unseen collection of furniture and archival material designed by SOM that Rarify has recently amassed—opens this week in New York at Luisaviaroma (on view February 10–April 30) and speaks to Bilotti and Rosenwasser’s dedication to preserving design history.

The pair recently took a break to talk about how to identify quality in designed objects—even if all you have to go off of is a photo—navigating design debates on Instagram, and what well-made furniture is actually worth.


DAVID ROSENWASSER: You and I both have very strong craft inclinations, whether that craft is manufactured or digital, but we come from different backgrounds. So it’s fun to talk and argue about what quality means with you.

JEREMY BILOTTI: Totally agree with you on that. So, what does quality mean?

Number one is materials. That’s sort of baseline, right? Even if it’s just a piece of molded plastic, but it’s the result of the entire career of Anna Castelli Ferrieri—you wouldn’t necessarily consider her Kartell Componibili module, for example, the highest-quality thing to buy—there’s a quality to it because it’s the result of years of study and innovation.

Quality of materials typically involves the use of solid materials. So if it’s wood, quality is solid hardwoods as opposed to veneers, unless there’s some sort of innovation or technological innovation that has to do with the use of them. I always prefer more natural materials, whole materials that have been processed less.

And I always look at the connections and fasteners. Those moments are often going to be representative of overall quality, because those are the critical components where there might be failures or compromises. Finishes and glues are also really indicative of quality. Certain finishes hold up really well over time; others do not. If it’s an older object, often the finishes exist in layers. You can see if something has been stained. I don’t really like that, because it’s a dishonest finish.

DR: I feel like you and I are stewards for design enthusiasts, which is to say that we feel a duty to consider quality in a variety of price points and also to seek out historic, vintage, and used pieces that people can engage with and buy.

Our storytelling, the brands we work with, the places we source things from—those are intentional. We try to select and talk about goods that we feel are of high design value or well made, and to be critical of things that we feel are the opposite. And to do that in a way where we’re considering a younger or less affluent audience that is maybe getting into buying vintage pieces, or collecting pieces, or buying their first new piece during a post-IKEA phase.

We also make sure to do our due diligence with regards to authenticity: things like making sure that we are specific about the dates of production or how we talk about the history of a piece. Make sure those things are as rigorous as we can reasonably identify. All of that curation, purchasing, refinishing, and restoration ties back to quality.

JB: You’re kind of saying value and quality, which really closely overlap. So much of how much a person values a designed object has to do with personal experience, taste, and how interested they are in it.

DR: That’s true. You and I aren’t Joe Schmos buying and selling furniture. We’ve been thinking about this stuff for a long time.

JB: Right. In college, my student job was working in the woodshop, running CNCs and robot arms, doing metalwork. Having firsthand experience working with materials is the single most important factor in being able to understand the quality of something, to gain insight about the difference between a solid hardwood versus a solid softwood versus laminated wood versus birch ply versus construction-grade ply.

Knowing a little bit about fabrication helps, too. That’s why, on our Instagram videos, we talk about how things are made and give basic fundamentals about materials: If you were a person in the factory making this thing, what are the steps? Does the final object take any shortcuts to those steps?

DR: I grew up in an environment where my dad was making stuff all the time, or working on or fixing things. He was an eye doctor, so tiny-scale craft was his day job. We had a watchmaker’s desk where he kept a whole suite of tools that could be used to dissect things. We also had metalworking tools and things for automotive, for when he was working on restoring an old Austin-Healey or something like that.

I was always intimidated and afraid of working on cars, but was really interested in furniture. I got hooked on the Eames lounger and became obsessed with the narrative that influential architects had designed the furniture to fill environments they designed, and the premise that, while I couldn’t own tons of architecture, I could own furniture that reflects innovation and design. The interest was: I want to learn about design and architecture. I like doing this in a hands-on way. I would like to have cool chairs. The cheapest way of doing this is buying things that need work.

I learned how to fix them by watching YouTube, reading forums and blogs. Later, I had a mentor named Daniel Ostroff, whom I call the Eames Wizard. He would coach me on being a responsible dealer.

JB: As you were talking about using different tools, I was thinking about our shared background in science and academia. We worked together for years as research scientists; we published papers. There was a time when we probably could have just gone into straight-up academia and never started a business together. That approach has led us to be as rigorous as we can be when it comes to understanding the different pieces of furniture we work with.

Sometimes our Instagram posts start a whole conversation about a piece of design. There are people who notoriously call us out for any mistakes we make. Some people look at that and come up to me and say, “How do you deal with all those crazy comments?” Actually, I kind of like them. People get into heated arguments about design in the comment section of our videos. But if it’s not happening there, where is it happening? We need more critique in design.

DR: Okay. Back to identifying quality in furniture. Let’s say you’re buying a new piece of design and you’re trying to distinguish whether it’s real or a knockoff. Or maybe you’re trying to verify the authenticity of a vintage piece, which is what I see more often.

In either scenario, credentials go a long way. That means buy stuff from places you trust. Buy from authorized dealers or buy from places that are certified and legit online.

Now, there are quite a few deceptive tactics. I’m thinking of USM Haller furniture. I’m thinking of other products where companies that make knockoffs have put a lot of money into getting themselves in the top tier of SEO. So it’s all the more important to be rigorous. If it looks too cheap, it probably is.

When evaluating something vintage, look for signs of age, and of wear, and look to see if it’s what presents itself as leather. Does it feel like a cardboard-y plastic material, or does it feel like an organic material that someone’s butt has been sitting on for years? Touch it, feel it, smell it. Use your senses to not necessarily authenticate, but to determine quality and hope for the best, authentication-wise, after that.

JB: Another tip: If you live near a design museum, that’s a place you could go to see high-quality design in person. There are also important or famous pieces of architecture that are filled with amazing furniture all around the country that you could visit. Study the pieces up close if you can’t actually get your hands on one.

If you can’t do that, video is the next best way to learn about these things. Scour YouTube videos. It’s a lot easier to understand a physical object on video than it is with still images, unless the still images have been really rigorously taken.

Using the internet and books to research the designers who created the pieces can tell you a little bit about the quality. If it’s a designer whose entire body of work is in aluminum or steel, and then there’s one plastic piece by them, maybe I’m less interested in that plastic piece.

On the flip side, research the manufacturer. How long has this manufacturer been around? What are their practices? Sometimes you can find information on that; other times it’s harder. But the designer and the manufacturer—those are the two parties involved.

DR: Can you really just look at a photo and know if it’s high-quality or not? Some of these manufacturers have relatively low-resolution photography or stock images that almost look like they’re presenting themselves to be void of materiality, even if craft is actually at the forefront of the object.

Given the digital day and age we’re in, it’s all the more critical for dealers like ourselves, who sell vintage pieces, and for manufacturers and dealers who sell new pieces, to represent their work exceptionally well digitally through video and photography, so that people who are never going to have a chance to visit the showroom can get their best chance at understanding the material.

There aren’t enough brands that focus on that. The average person is not touching and feeling the objects they’re buying. It’s just the reality of our era. Even if you live in New York and buy a twenty-thousand-dollar sofa, and there’s a showroom nearby, most people never see it until it gets to their apartment.

JB: Yeah. It’s counterintuitive because you would think, Oh, it’s so important to see it in person. But at the same time, the reality of the way we live today is that not everybody is going to be able to, and so we should do a better job at using media. We should use media well to make images and videos of design more accessible to lots of people.

What would you say to someone who wants to buy a nice piece of furniture, but thinks it’s too expensive?

DR: If this was 1946 and we were hardworking postwar Americans, the answer would probably be to think about this chair a lot, work hard, and save up. When you have the money, be patient and don’t feel like you need to impulse-buy something. Buy something of really good quality.

JB: That’s a legit approach. In America, we’re so used to impulse buying. We’re so used to products that are manufactured having short lifespans that we’re conditioned to think the lifecycle of an object is really short. So when we see a big price tag on something like a piece of furniture, it’s scary. And also because shit is not affordable in general these days.

That aside, if you’re buying less stuff over time early on, that could cut the cost of a high-quality piece of furniture in half or more. That’s an easy way to reason the price down. But justifying the value of something is different for every person because it’s personal.

Another way to understand furniture is that there’s a joy and an experience and enrichment that comes from learning about these things. The act of figuring out which piece actually truly has value to you—it adds something to your life.

How? That’s like asking, “What is the value of design?” Why would I hire an architect to make my house when a contractor could  do it, or a carpenter could do it? There’s value that contractors and carpenters bring that architects don’t have, obviously. But somebody who has dedicated their life to studying design, and then has done the work, and put the effort into embedding that knowledge and experience into a product or a building or a space—you really do feel and perceive the value there.

DR: Why would someone choose to use authentic, great design over pieces from—no offense—Restoration Hardware or Crate and Barrel, places that make good, but maybe not great, stuff, and certainly not respected design icons or companies focused on craft?

Part of it is, for you and I anyway, that yeah, we’re design enthusiasts and we love this stuff. We also see it through a lens of: We’re willing to pay the price and the premium because there’s an element of an heirloom quality, or authenticity, that helps to justify that decision.

If someone’s into handbags, would people perceive the authentic and the inauthentic as, “Oh, well, I’d buy a fake Eames chair, but I’d never buy a fake Gucci bag”? And with cars, same thing: Are you going to save up and buy a BMW or a car that’s less expensive, but looks a little bit like the same BMW? A lot of that’s about authenticity, about integrity, about perceived future value.

JB: Also, if it’s physically a high-quality object that’s been made well and lasts for generations, then all of a sudden that thing can start carrying memories and associations. There’s all kinds of human aspects that have the opportunity to become part of the piece’s story. We can see the provenance or history of an object over time; it just needs to be a certain quality for that to happen.

DR: I always say that if you want to be the best design collector or buyer, the way that you can best be informed about your decisions is to learn about them. Learn about stuff before you buy it.

Don’t just go and buy an Eames Lounge Chair because it’s a symbol. When you’ve saved up enough, go and find what it is you’re excited about—and make sure you’re excited about it for the right reasons.


This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.