When looking for topics for our Objects piece with the magazine Antiques, which we've been writing for each print issue since 2019, we often tap on friends and family for ideas. We don't wish to be limited by our own tastes, curiosities, or collections, and many suggestions have sparked new avenues of exploration and learning. Our subject for the January/February 2025 issue, tea caddies, and camouflaged ones in particular, came through just such an adventure.
Pippa's dad, Ed, bought a collection of Georgian tea caddies at auction, and himself stumbled into an accidental curiosity. The caddies were not, it turned out, the table he thought he was bidding on. Online auctions can be confusing for us all, and this was by far not the first, nor the last, time such an error will happen. The result was a corner remaining sans side table (for now) and a set of small inlaid 18th century boxes to distribute across living room surfaces such that they suggested at a collection without communicating a false obsession.
With tea caddies as our jumping off point, we knew we had to zoom in closer. The form is so varied — from Chinese porcelain caddies to European wood to American metal — that writing about them all together would be, to be blunt, ridiculous. As we researched, though, a particular form caught our eye: fruit. Apples, pears, and pumpkins made of turned wood presented an interesting niche within the category. The dealer S&S Timms offered another curiosity in small caddies made to look like 'proper' pieces of furniture. Perhaps sometimes mislabeled as salesman's samples, a miniature dresser or sideboard was often a locking tea caddy in disguise.
Speaking with dealers Mark Goodger and Robbie Timms brought clarity while heightening our curiosity about life in a world where so much more of life involved ceremony. To cook dinner, you had to stoke the fire ahead. To attend a dance, you had to sew a dress (or have one made). To make a cup of tea, you unlocked your tea caddy.
In a world on an unrelenting hunt for convenience, it was (and maybe still is) the inconvenient things that gave life rhythm. These forced pauses were the beat of the day's drum. Without them, what do we stand to lose? I think a lot more than we care to admit.
You can read our January/February 2025 Object feature on Tea Caddies here, and remember to support independent publishing by subscribing to the magazine Antiques here.