Sleeping beauty: Awakening my great grandmother’s Victorian dressing table

Back to the singular and therapeutic thrill of giving a vintage gem a chance to shine again. This time, the renovation came with a mystery. In my grandmother’s house was a dressing table, the kind where women like to sit as they brush their hair and attend to their faces. The table was in one of the bedrooms in my grandmother’s house where I used to stay when I came to visit. I’d sit in front of the mirror and try to straighten my wild curls with a blow dryer.

The dressing table had drawers and legs carved in the old Victorian style, and the top was covered in glass. Beneath the glass was a faded fabric in green silk brocade. Not a beautiful piece, to my eye—too ornate and serious to capture my strong affections—but clearly a part of the family since long before my grandmother was born.

So it was mostly out of respect for family history and my own long acquaintance with the dressing table that I chose it when my siblings and I were selecting items from my grandmother’s house. The table then sat in my basement for a year. But one day, it dawned on me that I could bring the table alive by removing the fabric under the glass and replacing it with something that would catch the eye. I looked online for a fabric that would create a contrast with the dark stolidness of the piece and give it a sense of humor and fun.

Here is the fabric I chose. It’s an ikat pattern on a sapphire background designed by an artist named Kimsa. I think her pattern is brilliant. The ikat pattern is classic—It doesn’t tie the fabric to a particular era, so it works with modern furniture as comfortably it does with an antique. The pattern is vibrant, but its repetition and symmetry create order that keeps the result from looking chaotic.

Fabric: Sapphire Ikat by kimsa (spoonflower.com)

Here’s the table with the Sapphire Ikat fabric. A friend refinished the top of the table and installed the new fabric. I later applied wood oil to the body, and I may decide to refinish the entire table. The ikat fabric pulls the eye to the carved drawers and legs. For the first time, I appreciate the table’s fine details.

Now for the mystery. When my friend removed the top of the table, he found stuffed behind one of the side drawers a photo. It had been carefully folded and placed where it would never be found.

The photo depicts a mustached gentleman in a top hat. He’s well-dressed and handsome in that late nineteenth century way. Judging from his garb, the photo long predates my grandmother. It would have been taken when my great grandmother was a young woman.

Who was he? And why would my great grandmother have hidden his photo so carefully? Had the gentleman been a suitor who came to the house? Did her family disapprove? Had he married someone else? Or did he die? Had he broken her heart? All that’s clear is that my great grandmother decided to keep his memory, in private and forever. She had folded the photo carefully and hidden it so deeply behind a drawer that even she would have difficulty taking it out to look at it. Instead, for the rest of her life, she would simply know the photo was there and that she was near the image of this man, every day, as she sat at her dressing table.

So the photo stayed hidden, through her lifetime and through the lifetime of her daughter, who inherited the table. And it would stay hidden still through the lifetime of her daughter’s daughter. Until, some 130 years later, when her great granddaughter would hatch a plan to pull the table from the basement and bring it back to life.