(Free) Retail Observer 001: A sample sale for furniture?... that is good?
A Snake curation of the best items from Vitra & Artek's new Regear-style website
This newsletter is brought to you by Vitra and Circle Store.
Hey all, limited edition unlocked Observer today… retail edition, looking at what jumps out to me most from the Circle Store stock… which is sort of… Vitra and Artek’s 2025 style sample sale, or, rather, a design equivalent of Arc’Teryx Regear or the Worn Wear site… used pieces: samples, trade show items, exhibition pieces from stuff by them… chairs, tables, vases, sofas, tabourets…
I tend heavy towards buying on auction (obviously) but such… a retail situation is something I’ve been waiting to hit design for a while. Legit. It’s a nice arrow to have in your quiver… being able to buy things right away, used things, in the middle between auctions and retail. Auctions, of course, have distinct stock and are surprising in simply the best way… retail is wide and convenient. This combo, to me, when checked regularly, is a mix of both worlds: steady stuff kept in the warehouse, but lots of left-field items (scroll down) for someone building their taste… like I said a good arrow to stock in the quiver.
Below are items on that site which I liked—good stuff that jumped out at me when I first saw the list and decided to make turn this into an Observer feature. I’d say dig around on that site if you want, and if you want updates on new stock getting in (they always have Alto stools, at a discount, and, because of this, they’re uncharacteristically sold out this week), I suggest signing up for their email list—which, while I’ve been getting it, has only been stock updates and the like about Circle Store. To fit out a house or apartment we must use every way. Anyways, good items below.
Retail Obs. 001
Allstar chair— Good office chair that reminds me of maybe a Steelcase or Piretti (Italian) because of the angles and colors. Office furniture’s tricky… new stuff most of all. Much of what’s been produced the past 30 to 35 years for this strict purpose has evolved, esp. since 2000, into full ergonomic use. Which is all right, I suppose. But this creates a situation in which work exists without… expressive design elements. I don’t agree with this. A good chair should look like something*…
This particular chair—designed by Konstantin Grcic (did the 360 drawers for Magis) in 2014—is actually designed… the colors are surprising and quiet and a bit jolie laide… muted but still loud. Runs about $1,520 retail. Some other color schemes on the site as well: black/white, green, off-red, in the wild, stock going in and out, one in Steelers colors. Now that I have been thinking about it more the shape also reminds me of Richard Sapper for Knoll’s great, simple Executive Task Chair. It’s the arms—just gaudy enough. $760
*You also can definitely get strong enough to sit on a pile of rocks for a workday and have it not hurt your back.
Dancing Wall (multiple options)—Pity Vitra, which wanted me to write about usable furniture for human beings living in apartments and I get most excited about a modular display wall system on wheels described on their site as “a mobile partition that can be used to flexibly divide offices into zones.” (retail $9,070.) But this is still Snake and… aesthetic margin walking here must be expected.
Some of this is because… utilitarianism is the enemy. To me. As a design principle. An office divider in a home… well, it’s different. It’s something someone should do. It’s a bit of design 101: use the stool for a table, use the cart for a desk…
This piece… in context is utilitarian. It is a strong room divider. Outside of an office it’s more of a screen. And there are not many good screens out there. Maybe a dozen? Eames, of course, Coromandels (though I have yet to see any that jump out though to my taste), a very insane one by Pesce (the Luigi; it doesn’t do anything), and one by Giovanni Offredi that is I would say my favorite. Any of these, or this one. If I had enough room in my place—when I have enough room in my next place—I’ll throw a couple of Dancers in there and hide my glute-ham developer behind the one on the left. $2,721
Stool Tool—Snake doesn’t have an ironclad shopping philosophy—no aesthetic set of rules, no concrete list of do’s and don’t’s, no deep-seeded dictum—since, really, if one is buying things for their home, there are no wrong decisions… since it is their home and not mine, and so long as the item has a point of view, and, maybe, is liquid enough so it can be sold off down the line for a profit. When you stop buying garbage that’s all the math that you need. The rest is just specifics.
That said—I do have aesthetic north stars. Red ABS plastic is the first one. It might be the last one as well. I like wild-ass red pieces of plastic. In my house I have a ton. I like them because, set against other pieces of furniture, they are not very loud, not as loud as they seem in a picture. They’re fun, expressive, light… near-joking… but they never take over the room. They just… make it deeper… here is a loud red piece of magic, here is the rest of the house. I don’t know—you can’t get too cerebral about these kinds of things. Also by Grcic, and designed in ‘16. In grey and green, too, and generally sold at $455 retail. Here $227
Yrjo Kukkapuro Experiment chair—Probably the most ass-beating thing on here. A nice chair to look at a dozen times and contemplate… I covered Yrjo a while ago in a Lore, but saw this chair for the first time in person only in June, at Artek 2nd Cycle, the brand’s used store there in Helsinki (pics at top, and the bottom). Louder than I remembered… very direct, all those right angles, but still jaunty… compact. Like a healthy bantamweight fighter. You wonder, after a stare, if this chair might work in your house… it is really so loud…. but it keeps all its energy tight around itself. Retail for this is around $7,000, and it has not seen an auction since 2022. Sometimes the aesthetic questions come up right away, sometimes they build over time.
Yrjo is a trip… his work is a bridge/mix of French and Italian design from midcentury, a bit after. Items are often held back, warm and minimal, but with moments of… electricity, animation… So too this. A simple shape here, but the arms. Really just a perfect chair. The kind that cannot be described in a sentence and which is recognized by agreement; $5,000 here.
Kaari table (round)—Nice accent table here with all the design and excitement sequestered to the base. Feels like a rejoinder to the Tulip… which freaked it at the top. Nice and plain, stable… below the base a Flos Toio (lamp with the battery bottom) thing going on… not aesthetically, but rather that both display their bare wires. This one runs about $2,200 retail, and was designed by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec (French), who did the very high back Alcove sofa from ‘18 (you’ve seen it; very Rennie Mackintosh; one of the wilder things designed over the past 7 years). <Alec Baldwin in Departed voice>The world needs plenty more good side tables. $1,300
ID Trim chair—Great discount here… Snake’s Lock of the Week at $622, runs $2,000 retail. This one… was designed around a decade ago by Antonio Citterio (he is Italian; Baisity and Diesis sofas; look them up, they are wonders)… and is… just a wild office chair, in keeping with the newer ergonomic chairs that office managers must buy. Fine. But it is different from those… it looks like something from the start and on repeat viewings it becomes… loud. Really loud. Almost gaudy. There are a few different different options (air, mesh, etc.), at different prices, around $6-700 on Circle Store, with some more traditional looking than others. But this one to me is the one. It’s in Hermès green, and has the nice counterpoint here with the jutting out back of the seat… what a crazy design decision. It gets louder and louder and louder every time you observe it. Including this in your work day would change things.
Quick Hits
Kukkapuro prototype chair, $5,000 (pictured)—wild; haven’t seen Yrjo do wood before. I see Geoff Snack somehow having this in his storage or something and offhandedly mentioning it. Insane piece, very destabilizing, very curious, many questions.
Girard metal wall relief, $1,060 (down from $2K)—a nice adornment. The face here is the key, and also how small it is…
I had another QH about the E60 stool but they sold out over the weekend. They had a half dozen. They have a Butterfly Stool (by Yanagi—the best) up now and more E60s (pictured below) coming in.) I would say sign up for the email and wait. Good to stack in the corner and when people come over for Longhorns football they can sit on them as they eat wings.
Thanks for reading.
Snake