insanely chic ugly furniture to sit/covet while stuck @ home
visual aide to the new GQ Style piece on the subject
More to read for those stuck at home: I wrote about the best furniture pieces in the game (mostly Italian from the 70s) for GQ Style’s spring magazine. It just went online and you can read it here:
https://www.gq.com/story/guide-to-ugly-furniture
https://www.gq.com/story/guide-to-ugly-furniture
https://www.gq.com/story/guide-to-ugly-furniture
It’s in this issue of GQ Style:
Which came out a decade ago in early March. Check for it at CVS or maybe do your grocery shopping in 7-10 days at a store that sells magazines? Whole Foods does I think. I don’t know.
Here are some other ugly pieces I like which are slightly less important than the ones in the ish:
Pietro Salmoiraghi and Antonio Locatelli’s Centopiedi—the greatest daybed ever made. Salmoiraghi was from Milan and Locatelli was from Bergamo, so a partnership of opposites. Produced around 1972, it’s no longer in production and has these hollow plastic tapered tube legs, there’s also a double-wide version, but when I leafed through the Kartell book it wasn’t in there.
Verner Panton’s Living Tower AND Roberto Matta “Malitte” — Living Tower (1969) (Longhorns-adjacent orange) and the Malitte (below) both need tall ceilings (which I have) and look comfortable. You either break up the Malitte or everyone takes a level and sits on the Panton like a Beatles record. No one talks about the Malitte, but it was on Roadshow. Panton is the most out of pocket Danish designer from that era. I like the Malitte more.
The Wendell Castle Molar Chair. Castle died a few years ago—rest in peace. Though the Molar Chair (1969) is in the MoMA permanent collection, I like the two-seater more. It is the best hard plastic furniture sofa there is, because it is the most tense. Simple, round, plain and one color, with some ornamentation—cusps—that prevent it from being too plain. So much plastic furniture is too plain. Like Sori Yanagi’s Elephant Stool, or chintzy like the Kartell Ghost chair. This is neither. It is round and craggy and that interplay makes it a strong and direct and beautiful chair.
Some (many) of Castle’s other designs—mirrors, tables—are more ornate than this one. Actually, I would say they are much more ornate. This one is comparatively spare. Castle chairs aren’t cheap anymore, and maybe were cheap when they came out, I don’t know. But they were cheap for a few years a few years ago. They were on Craigslist for a few hundred dollars pretty regularly. You could throw a rock and find a Molar Chair. Most of the pieces in the GQ piece can be found way cheaper in Europe than here. Like severely cheap. Maybe when this is all over we all get together and buy a storage container.
Anyways, those are my runners-up.
Thanks for reading, be safe.
Snake
past issues, other projects, etc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-JLRt0Ec6gZBm50hATYCYmLctnF9GhVijoEbam50JSw/edit