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HOW STRANGE THE WORLD IS...
THE FIREPLACE THAT I AM HERE PRESENTING TO YOU IS ...AS HEALTHY AS A CORN AND STRONG (IT WAS REMOVED ON MASONRY AND NOT SCALED ON SLABS...)), IT IS AS BEAUTIFUL AND AGGRATEFUL AS ITS BROTHERS OF THE SAME AND RIGHT NINETEENTH-CENTURY (Napoleon III period, in my opinion the most ELEGANT, sympathetic and captivating nineteenth-century period)...
...AND YET... WE ARE OFFERING IT AT 1000 /1500 € LESS THAN ITS AVERAGE PRICE, AS YOU CAN EASILY VERIFY BY BROWSING THROUGH THE PAGES OF THIS SITE AT THE LOUIS XV FIREPLACE CATEGORY.
WHERE IS THE CATCH?
WHAT AM I HIDING FROM YOU?
The catch is you, my dear customers, or rather, your wives.
Mind you, I am talking about the majority of you and your wives and not about the totality, maybe you who are reading me are not part of the cohort I am going to talk (or rather, shoot) about below.
You should know (it sounds like the“once upon a time” but don't worry, I will try to keep it short) that at the beginning of my career (1970s) White Carrara marble fireplaces COULD have, more or less, the same price, the customer did not make much difference between White ‘C’, White “P”, Ordinary White, Arabescato White etc... etc...
With the exception of White Statuary marble (very white in color but also as hard to find as the winning ticket in the New Year's Lottery), all Pompadour Galbé fireplaces in right condition of preservation were the same price.
For the past 20 years, and with a frequency that increases logarithmically, your lady (and you husbands reflexively as they are forced into obedience) has been dreaming/wanting/desiring/imposing a Pompadour family fireplace, however.
SHE WANTS IT very white though, in fact very white, preferably Tide-washed.
The thing is, my darlings (adjective not of convenience, my customers are dear to me for real, without them I could not survive and especially could not satisfy my - insane, according to my wife - passion for antique fireplaces)..what was I saying?
Ah, yes, the fact is, my dear clients, that the very white fireplace is carved in equally white Carrara Statuary, a very expensive marble and used ONLY for very expensive mantels, sometimes monumental, always from very rich clients .
In my working life (which will soon reach the half-century mark) I will have found a Pompadour Pied Galbé mantel in White Carrara Statuario every ten years. Then, this is true, every year we disassemble two or three Pompadour Galbé in Carrara White “P” (which is a bit of a middle ground between the classic “White C”-whichis the marble of our fireplace-and the unattainable Bianco Statuario).
That is why the mantel I am proposing to you here, carved in the more common and less expensive Carrara White, what I referred to as “C” above, is proposed by me at this infamous price, a price that is offensive to the sculptor who masterfully made this mantel and also offensive to his polisher (do you know how many days the “polisher” had to spend manually forcefully passing his pumice stones over the surfaces of our fireplace? More or less a week. At today's costs, assuming AND NOT CONCESSING that you find a polisher willing to do this work, you would pay him no less than 400/500 € per day. Do the math a little).
Cheers (which is always the most important thing) to you who have had the Patience to read me,
Maurizio.
