This sideboard, which is designed in the late 18th Century 'antique' manner, with central frieze 'tablet', 'elliptic'-fronted pedestals flanked by reeded columnettes with palm-leaf capitals, and supported on paired tapering columnar legs, derives from a 'sideboard table' pattern published by Thomas Sheraton in his Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer's Drawing Book, 1793, pl.29. Another sideboard (pl.26) had a related brass balustrade, capped by 'sacred urn' vases and acanthus-scrolled branches for candles described as being 'used to set large dishes against, and to support a couple of candle or lamp branches in the middle which, when lighted, give a very brilliant effect to the silver ware...' The tablet's festive trophy of a bacchic lion-mask on crossed hymen-torches relates to that of a Grecian sideboard published by Sheraton in his Encyclopaedia, 1804, pl.1.

The sideboard's rear stage compartment, with sliders for glasses, is a popular Scottish feature of the period and appears on similar sideboards also with lion-headed handles, but without the rail and tablets, that bears the label of James Mein of Kelso, no doubt the same cabinet-maker who subsribed to Sheraton's 1793 Drawing Book. (See: D. Jones, Scottish Cabinet Makers' Price Books, Regional Furniture, Leeds, 1989, p.33, fig.7).