Sold on thesaleroom.com: a £16,500 pair of Voysey chairs and a rare Subbuteo space game

1. Voysey Arts & Crafts chairs

Enthusiasts who hoped to buy a pair of chairs by one of the great Arts & Crafts designers at something close to their £20-40 estimate at an auction in the Cotswolds were to be disappointed.

The two oak and rush side chairs, offered for sale by the Cotswold Auction Company in Cirencester on March 4 were spotted by two knowledgeable bidders. The contest opened at £80 and concluded at £16,500 (plus buyer’s premium). The winning bid at some 825 times the low estimate was tendered online via thesaleroom.com.

Chairs such as these with splats pierced with a heart are perhaps the best known furniture design by Charles Francis Annesley Voysey (1857-1941).

Versions of the chair, sometimes with slightly different proportions, were made from 1902 with most thought to have been made by the London cabinetmaker FC Nielsen, which also made other furniture designed by Voysey. 

Chairs of this much-imitated type reside in a number of English and American museums and private collections.

2. Subbuteo space game

By Spacecraft to the Moon, a rare Subbuteo game, £3000 at Stacey’s.

Among the rarest of all Subbuteo games invented and manufactured by Peter Adolph in Tunbridge Wells are those without a sporting theme. This curious toy titled By Spacecraft to the Moon was produced as the Space Race began to hot up in the late 1950s.

The aim of the ‘Game of Skill to Commemorate Space Year One’ was to land a flying saucer on the surface of the Moon (the card box) by use of a metal wire launcher and a short length of plastic tubing. According to the instructions the coloured plastic ‘saucers’ could be piloted up to 40 feet into the air, so a successful landing was difficult: a pilot’s badge was available from Adolph to those who achieved the feat.

Unlike Subbuteo’s hugely successful table-top football game (launched in 1947 and now in its eighth decade of production), this particular ‘companion’ game, and a similar toy titled Journey Into Space, was short-lived.

Few devotees had seen a complete example outside the collecting literature before this one turned up at Stacey’s in Raleigh on March 2. Toy specialist David Johnson had found it in a box of old board games during an Essex house call.

It was in excellent condition save a broken corner to the box and he hoped it would bring at least £60-80. He was right: a deluge of interest greeted its arrival online with bidding from collectors via thesaleroom.com reaching £3000.

3. Georgian coffee grinder

Georgian lignum vitae coffee grinder, £3800 at Willingham Auctions.

When coffee was first introduced to England in the mid 17^th century the beans were crushed by a pestle and mortar. In the Georgian period it paid to own a mechanical grinder such as this to quicken the laborious process.

Similar ‘bullet shaped’ mills made in lignum vitae are pictured in many different variations in the major books on treen: Edward Pinto’s Treen and Other Wooden Bygones (1979), Jonathan Levi’s Treen for the Table (1988) and Owen Evan-Thomas’Domestic Utensils of Wood (1992). The various sections unscrew to allows for filling with beans and the removal of the ground coffee.

This example, offered for sale at Willingham Auctions, Cambridge on February 29, is a little more decorative than most and stands 15in (36cm) on a pedestal foot. As an excellent example of a coveted type, it took £3800 (estimate £100-200), selling to a bidder using thesaleroom.com.