Late Ebening Snake Auction Observer 066: James Bond desk is actually deco; a deal on Magistretti and another sofa, rare early Sottsass, space lighting

Plus Joker dishes, the head-and-shoulders best Ron Arad piece and why work capacity matters

Happy New Year’s everyone—a middling week of auctions, as houses slowly return to schedule… but enough good stuff, frankly, to outfit a handful of apartments. May this be the year all our apartments and homes drop their nuts on the competition. This week: deeply economical seating, a time-bending lamp, an very early Sottsass piece, Magistretti’s best and least fussy sofa and outdoors furniture that works indoors even better. But first:

Housekeeping:

• Greetings from Los Angeles where there is one beautiful manual transmission mini truck on every block.

• I chatted (podcast) with Ben Dietz at [SIC] Weekly the other week and the conversation is recorded on his Substack:

  [SIC] 277: Scream Inside

  Ben’s newsletter is a resource: a thorough and exacting roundup of things worth reading, his emails recall the old link roundup ones from a decade ago (think reDEF) but better since they’re more attuned and specific. Convo was one of the more workdays last year and covers my thoughts on lifting, raw dairy, the collectible market, Mr. Beast and seed oils (really), and the $100,000 vase. Happy to talk more on these topics at all times…

• I also contributed to SSense’s great year-end list (which can be read here) alongside a good crew of contributors. I consider my submission a massive success if only for having gotten E-Town Concrete mentioned in there. The most forward-looking artist of the past quarter century immortalized, finally, on the most refined editorial website there is.

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Auctions Observed:

Bodil Kjaer rosewood desk, NJ, ends Thurs.: One of the better burl/Goodfellas girlfriend apartment pieces I’ve come across on L.A. lately, and is one of those pieces that confirms every good qualities a design trend can possess. It is arresting, a real breath of fresh air and inimitable. It’s especially good when you’re taking in primary colors and round shapes, or minimal design all day. Half its success is from the power here—its dimensions: stout and direct—and half is its off-centeredness, what with its colors and nasty metal. Kjaer is a Danish architect, she’s in her 90s and is probably best known for her “James Bond desk,” so called since it’s in three of those movies. This is that desk but in another material. She spent most of her time building buildings. What’s nice about this is that it’s quite different from what we think of when we immediately think of Danish furniture… what we know and associate with Denmark is really just a thin sliver of time—50s and 60s—and a small selection of materials. But really it’s endless. Part of a hot and cold auction with a couple bright spots: a mid-tier set of white Paulins and a beautiful Eames Executive chair. Such are the limited spoils of the first week of the year. $4,000; the last few of these have gone in the $13,000 range.

Magistretti Maralunga settee, CT, IHS, ends Thurs.: A masterpiece, yes, or more specifically an equal parts perfect and workmanlike sofa… which to me is the best type of furniture as it is both correctly executed, inspired and not fussy about it. Prices on Maralungas rose sharply in the past five years; lately they run anywhere between a few hundred and $3,500, but almost all overseas. The one that sold domestically went for $1,400. Another identical settee in shiny leather is going for even less; Seller always has hot stuff, but this small auction is mostly decent teak and includes a great Danish braided rope armchair in beechwood. Certainly the first Snake Lock of the Week of the year. $225

Sauze Ganymede lamp, Denmark, in-house shipping, ends like right now.: Another new-to-me item for another new year; don’t know much about this fool, but digging around Max Sauze is a French designer, mostly lighting, lots of chandeliers, born in Algiers in the ‘30s… some of his side tables and so on are really execrable—they’re the exact pieces of crap that busy up bad hotels… or AirBNBs:

Subscribe to another newsletter if you want an analysis of why things suck; there is lots of garbage in this world, esp. aesthetically, dwelling on it is no way to live. Anyways the lamp here’s taken me in; it’s out of time and can pass, with some liberty, for either a Deco piece or a more conservative item from the 1950s. It’s from the late ‘60s (still a conservative era, in France anyways)… this is the push-pull I think of developing taste. Or even just testing your temperature on individual pieces. It’s helpful to think vaguely about most furniture: flexibility and era-agnosticness is not a way of sloughing off knowledge, but is a way to take chances on items that might not immediately be within the era you like—i.e. pieces you just come across here and there. Approaching things flexibly allows us