Between the wars the Paris furniture trade ran on veneer. Rosewood, kingwood and amboyna came in as thin leaves, and the skill was in the cutting: laying them into lattices and chevrons so a flat door reads as pattern and depth at once. The best of it was made by workshops that never signed anything, supplying the big retailers under their name rather than the maker's. That is most of what survives, and it is why a piece like this arrives with its quality obvious and its authorship gone.

The whole front is built on one idea, which is opposition. The outer doors bow out hard to rounded ends, and the legs beneath them rake in as they fall, so the case swells at the top and pulls away at the floor. The top answers with a serpentine front edge and the apron is cut to a matching wave. Four doors: a central pair carrying a framed panel of harlequin lattice, the batons laid in alternating directions so the same timber catches light two ways, with a thread of pale stringing drawn around it. The outer doors take the same lattice as a band across the middle. Gilt-metal mounts, foliate and small, at the escutcheons and again as sabots on the legs.

The proof of the workshop is inside, where nobody was meant to look. Every interior is sycamore, pale and satiny against the dark shell. Each outer cupboard holds a shaped drawer and a shaped shelf, both cut to follow the curve of the door rather than squared off behind it, both hand-dovetailed, and both banded with a fine chequered inlay in red, green and black. That band is perhaps four millimetres wide. It is inside a cupboard, on a shelf, behind a door that was shut when the piece left the workshop and has been shut most of the time since. Nobody was ever meant to see it. Somebody did it anyway.