The handsome cabinet, being intended for a bedroom apartment window-pier, features a pier-glass in the hinged façade; and the latter is also recessed to allow for the chest-of-drawer's folding 'dressing-table' top. The cabinet's early Georgian 'Roman' architecture comprises sunk-panelled pilasters capped by voluted and acanthus-wrapped trusses, and its frieze reveals the sculpted head of the laurelled poetry-deity Apollo within a veil-festoon. The various elements feature in patterns, in the manner of Inigo Jones, for a 'Tuscan Book Case' and a window architrave published in Batty Langley's Treasury of Designs, 1740 (pls. CLVIII and L). Related bureaux of this form with flap-top chest sections were supplied to the Earl of Dumfries for Dumfries House by the Edinburgh cabinetmaker, Francis Brodie. They are referred to in the Dumfries account as 'a Lady's Closet'. Another, in walnut, is at Penicuik House and was supplied by George Riddell of Edinburgh in 1722. It may be that this particular form is peculiar to Scotland (S. Pryke, 'The extraordinary Billhead of Francis Pryke', Regional Furniture, 1990, p. 86 & figs. 8-11).

The Victoria & Albert Museum possesses a related bureau-cabinet with hinged and mirrored façade, but with marquetried rather than mirrored tablet beneath its 'pier glass', and its interior is inlaid with the name of the Monmouth Square cabinet-maker Samuel Bennett (d. 1740) (C. Gilbert, Pictorial Dictionary of Marked London Furniture 1700-1840, Leeds, 1996, fig. 113).