ONE of Britain’s leading furniture restorers has blown the whistle on the antique trade - revealing that he has fabricated pieces that have been offered for sale for up to £525,000 each.

Dennis Buggins, 48, has revealed that his Kent farmhouse has been operating as a production line for £30m of replica and revamped antiques for more than two decades. He claims he only recently discovered some of his work had been offered for sale as original pieces.

“We have turned out hundreds of pieces from carcasses or from scratch,” he said last week. “They have been misrepresented and a line has been crossed.”

Last week Buggins was offered £200,000 by one of his clients partly on condition that he sign a document claiming all his allegations to The Sunday Times were false. He refused.

One of the principal sellers of Buggins’s work is the London antique dealer John Hobbs, who at one stage was paying about £10,000 a week to the Kent workshop. Buggins said a number of items promoted on Hobbs’s website have been seriously misrepresented. Hobbs denies any wrongdoing. His client list is believed to have included the American billionaire collector Les Wexner, owner of the Victoria’s Secret lingerie label, the Getty family and the New York interior designer Tony Ingrao.

Much of Buggins’s work has been crafted in the exact styles of the great cabinetmakers, including Thomas Chippendale and Christian Meyer, a Russian craftsman.

In testimony to The Sunday Times, Buggins says: He has used barn planks, old furniture and brass mouldings to create or revamp antiques on sale for up to £525,000. He was commissioned to assemble a pair of “18th-cen-tury” commodes from “flat pack” components provided by Hobbs. He used plywood templates of Chippendale desks to make replicas virtually indistinguishable from the genuine item. One of his pieces – described to potential buyers as an Italian “19th-century gilt centre table” – was crafted from an old wardrobe and four old table legs. If it were authentic, it could fetch up to £100,000.

“Most people think 18th or 19th-century craftsmanship is dead, but we’ve been doing it here,” Buggins said last week.

His disclosures will cause ructions at the top of London’s antique market, where pieces can sell for more than £1m. “These pieces are like works of art and collectors insist on originality,” said one antiques expert.

Buggins says his pieces are unlikely to be detected because they are often made by cannibalising parts from genuine but low-priced antiques.

Hobbs is one of his key clients and Buggins said he recently discovered that items assembled or radically altered in the workshop were being described as original on the website for Hobbs’s gallery in Pimlico. Other outlets cannot be identified for legal reasons. Hobbs said an Italian-style table assembled by Buggins was mistakenly put on his website and described as “19th-century”. He said other pieces had been “expensively restored” and he rejected Buggins’s claims that the descriptions would mislead clients.

Hammonds, the legal firm representing Hobbs, said in a statement: “Our client has never dishonestly sold items as genuine antiques which he knew were fakes.” The Sunday Times has no evidence that Hobbs knowingly sold fakes, but he faces allegations of misrepresentation. He denies this.

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