§ 01 · The bench
Higher-value acquisitions are inspected in person, at the bench.
Every piece routed through the bench arrives with a working file: the listing draft, the agent's research notes, and any provenance trail that came in with the candidate. The curator reads the file first, then handles the piece. Marks, joins, surfaces, and construction tell a different story in the hand than they do on the screen, so the inspection is never delegated to photographs alone. The bench call is the call that lands on the listing.
§ 02 · Original versus reproduction
The desk asks first whether the piece is what the listing says it is.
Maker marks, period-appropriate construction, materials, and tooling are run against the bench expectation for the period and the maker. Sympathetic but later components, period-correct replacements, and outright reproductions are all distinct outcomes and each gets called out separately in the listing. The buyer's first right is to know what they are holding, so the call is written into the condition notes rather than left to inference.
§ 03 · Restoration versus honest patina
A clean repair is a fact about the piece; age and wear are also facts.
The desk distinguishes between restoration that returns the piece to working order — re-glued join, replaced leather, refitted hardware — and the patina that simply comes with age: softened brass, oxidized silver, hairline shrinkage. Both are written into the listing, in plain language, so the buyer never has to read between the lines of "good condition" to know which is which. Anything beyond light conservation is named in the notes.
§ 04 · From bench to listing
What the buyer reads is what the curator saw.
The condition notes shipped with a listing are a transcription of the bench call, written plainly. Repairs, replacements, touch-up, and any deviation from the catalog expectation are stated explicitly. Where the piece is wholly original, the listing says so without softening. The buyer's trust is built one unhedged line at a time, and the bench notes are how that line gets written.