The elegantly serpentined top of golden Indian calamander or 'coromandel wood', has richly-figured black striations, which earned it the name of 'marblewood'. It is framed by a moulded border that is painted black to create the antique 'Etruscan' fashion popularised by Robert Adam's Works in Architecture, 1774. A 'toilet-table' slide is concealed, like the drawers, by the striped veneer that creates an appropriate muslin-drapery effect. Its rounded columnar angles are echoed by its ebonised plinth and truss-bracketed feet; and its golden handles are suitably enriched with tasselled lambrequin drapery suspended from an acanthus flower. The pattern for the palm-flowered and reeded handle, numbered '1487', features in an 18th Century metal-worker's pattern book preserved at the Victoria and Albert Museum (N. Goodison, 'Metal-Work Pattern Books', Furniture History, 1975, pl. 23).