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View Full Version : What an amazing desk!



Kurt S
December 21st, 2014, 03:44 AM
I would love to have this desk!!
http://youtu.be/MKikHxKeodA

Rusty888
December 21st, 2014, 04:30 AM
Way too many hidden compartments. I'm sure I left my pen in one of the 1.2 billion hiding places.

Hate to see the price of this

Tracy Lee
December 21st, 2014, 07:26 AM
Wow!!!!

klpeabody
December 21st, 2014, 08:03 AM
Incredible. Thanks for sharing this.

writingrav
December 21st, 2014, 08:29 AM
If I had one I might finally have room for all my junk!

Crazyorange
December 21st, 2014, 08:40 AM
Great desk. I agree with rusty...too many hidden drawers. I would forget either the drawers or what was inside them. What's the history on the desk? Must have been made for royalty.

cwent2
December 21st, 2014, 10:44 AM
One of the finest achievements of European furniture making, this cabinet is the most important product from Abraham (1711--1793) and David Roentgen's (1743--1807) workshop. A writing cabinet crowned with a chiming clock, it features finely designed marquetry panels and elaborate mechanisms that allow for doors and drawers to be opened automatically at the touch of a button. Owned by King Frederick William II, the Berlin cabinet is uniquely remarkable for its ornate decoration, mechanical complexity, and sheer size.

This cabinet is from Kunstgewerbemuseum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, and is on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in the exhibition Extravagant Inventions: The Princely Furniture of the Roentgens:

Footage courtesy of VideoART GmbH and Kunstgewerbemuseum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

barnaby.bumble
December 21st, 2014, 03:43 PM
HOLY CRAP!! I literally lol'd at 1:15 when the 2nd little hidden drawer swung out from under the 1st little hidden drawer. It's like a moment from a Dr. Seuss cartoon.

The thing probably weighs more than my car.

Bogon07
December 21st, 2014, 04:45 PM
Fascinating. How many keys do you need to operate it ?
It is great the way the easel unfolds too.

I can imagine "Damn bedtime already, I've spent 4 just hours playing the desk and haven't had a chance to write any letters yet"

caribbean_skye
December 21st, 2014, 05:18 PM
Now thats the desk i need. The easel alone would be great for calligraphy practice. although i could see spending far too much time trying to remember where i put everything. Thanks for sharing!

Tracy Lee
December 24th, 2014, 09:40 AM
I loved the easel too. Really a work of art.

amk
December 25th, 2014, 01:14 PM
That is wonderful. There's something so satisfying about having a secret drawer... I've never seen so many in one piece of furniture! It's particularly nice to see how the mechanisms work.

reprieve
December 25th, 2014, 06:55 PM
That is a feat of engineering genius. Awesome.

barnaby.bumble
December 27th, 2014, 11:24 AM
The other amazing thing is, apparently, it all still works.

Inkflow
March 2nd, 2021, 10:12 PM
I would settle for an MP3 file playing the opening music from the video every time I sat down to write! LOL

penwash
March 3rd, 2021, 09:14 AM
Thanks for resurrecting this post, that desk is impressive indeed.

BoBo Olson
October 13th, 2021, 07:57 AM
Roentgen is one of the greatest cabinet makers of all time.
I had seen another cabinet perhaps, with less hidden stuff than that one on German TV. Or they didn't take the time to show as many compartments as this showing.

The real problem was it was a status item, where you showed it off to various Kings and Princes....so it was never quite as secret as it could have been.
Cost. Then it was cheap...WAG the life time work of a village; labor was cheap....even the best labor.

Cost.
I obviously saw the Puskin desk on TV way back in the when of 40 years ago. There is a furniture museum in Frankfurt Germany, that had some secrete compartment ancient desks, but because I had 'seen' the Puskin desk, I was less impressed than I should have been. They had no Roentgen desk.

Don't know if that was the writer Puskin but thought it was the cabinet maker Puskin's desk.
I expected to find it; when surfing, easily. But didn't. It amazed the hell out of me some 40 years ago, not only for the well justified real money price of a million dollars.

Well a 'old' Puskin desk....looking like a nice flat good wood boss desk....went for over $1,000,000, 40 years ago.
The six foot by 4 foot top of the desk rotates out for all sorts of shallow little compartments underneath it. Everywhere you can think there is a secret compartment, there is. Everywhere where you think there couldn't be a secret compartment, there was.
It looked like your basic large heavy doable pedestal sleek 20's boss's desk...you know the basic 250 pound desk. Don't think it weighed more than 50 pounds in they showed someone picking it up with one arm. Even had secret compartments down in the six inch high legs, both sides.

msw
March 11th, 2023, 12:07 PM
what a tremendous bit of design! thanks for the post ... the level of craftsmanship is downright intimidating - i can't even get proper dovetails yet...