The 'pier-commode' dressing-table, suitable for a bedroom apartment, ingeniously combines both writing-table and chest of drawers. Its form may have developed from the simpler writing-table with fold-out top supported on swing-legs: in October 1690, the court cabinet maker Gerrit Jensen supplied three folding tables for Queen Mary at Kensington Palace (A. Bowett, English Furniture 1660-1714, Woodbridge, 2002, p. 213, n. 19). The decoration of this bureau-table, using Chinese lacquer panels incorporated onto an oak and pine carcase, is typical of the late 17th century fashion for 'Japan' or oriental decoration, the contemporary nomenclature of which was imprecise: Chinese wall paper at this time was often referred to as 'India' paper and Chinese lacquer known as 'Japan'. Its Chinese lacquer decoration typifies that proposed in Stalker & Parker's influential Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing, 1688, deemed suitable for the decoration of bedroom apartments.

A similar red and gilt-lacquer bureau-table, but with Roman Tuscan columns, instead of the earlier form of the baluster columns on the present bureau, was sold by the Marquess of Cholmondeley, Houghton Hall, Norfolk, in these Rooms, 8 December 1994, lot 114 (£188,500). The latter was formerly in the collection of the late Sir Philip Sassoon, Bt, Trent Park, Hertfordshire, and recorded in the Blue Room (South Drawing Room) in 1939. A further walnut example of this form is in the Irwin Untermyer collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Y. Hackenbroch, English Furniture in the Irwin Untermyer Collection, London, 1958, plate 278, fig. 320). And a further writing-table elaborately inlaid with seaweed marquetry, from the Assheton-Smith Collection is illustrated in R. Edwards, The Dictionary of English Furniture, vol. III, London, rev. ed., 1954, p. 241, fig. 2.