It's a technological anachronism, using modern operating and manufacturing concepts in a form that was already too expensive to produce even a hundred years ago, when the last hammer shotguns (except for costly custom models) were vanishing. The steel is modern, with barrels capable of handling any modern 3" shotshells on the market. The wood is a plain-grain, but very dense and solid, walnut. Except for the blued barrels, every exposed piece of metal is color case-hardened, done for no other reason but to show that the ancient art still isn't quite dead. The coloring is hard to show in a picture, but here's the best I could do.
Modern design concepts include rebounding hammers without a half-cock (always more of a danger than a safety), and a safety that could be engaged or disengaged with either hammer in either state. IOW, make things simpler, and therefore safer, because there are fewer ways to put the weapon into an unsafe condition.
The engraving is well done, but simple. It's somewhere on every visible part, even the steel buttplate. This could be considered a "middle class" shotgun, except the sidelock design was the most expensive to build, and the first thing to be abandoned as other designs came into being. And Europe didn't have much of a middle class, and they weren't encouraged to own shotguns, unless they lived in the countryside. To top it all off, everybody, regardless of social status, would consider "short" twenty-inches barrels "too American", and therefore crude and unsporting, when 30 to 36 inches was more a gentleman's shotgun. Of course, Americans had other requirements for a shotgun, including Mexican bandits, Philippine guerrillas, and heavily-armed domestic scum. Plus, there was so much mechanical innovation coming out of America that the newfangled pump shotguns could be equipped with short barrels too, providing massive firepower in a small package. A Marine from 1899, fighting the Boxers in China, would instinctively appreciate, and try to acquire, the Remington 870 pump shotgun with 14" breacher barrel, even over his brand-new 1897 Winchester pump shotgun with 20" barrel.
I can't conceive of any European manufacturer making a double this costly (less fancy embellishments) with this short a barrel, except as a specialized shotgun intended for game wardens of the state, or the local aristocracy. Their job was to control two- and four-legged vermin, while the elite harvested the sporting game reserved for their class.
A shotgun like this would have been the proximate cause of my paternal grandfather for bringing his young family to America during the hard years right after WW1. He ate well, and kept a lot of other poor country folks from starving in his sideline as a professional poacher. As he once told me, he wasn't worried about going to prison if caught, but was very concerned when he would have been released, because his father, the local game warden, would be waiting to really put the hurt on. A new life in America was much safer and simpler.