Obs 131: Search for prototypes and win
FURNITURE FURNITURE FURNITURE
Hello all. I’m flying at the moment. The housekeeping here is my column on what might replace the Togo as viral sofa is live on Dwell.com. In it I interviewed my liege FOR SCALE, as well as Dan Rosen, the chair intellectual, and Coco Robazza, a dealer and founder of Toronto-based vintage design business In Corso.
Retail Corner: RALPH
I wrote about pomo chess sets (Michael Graves) in last week’s Retail Corner, this week I’m sort of moved by this real slick Ralph Lauren home cocktail shaker on Moda. Called the Thorpe, definitely named after Gentleman Jim. Priced decent (under $200)—I link to a similar prototype of a shaker (a century old) in Europe below; these highball glasses don’t have their weight tracked, but they’re crystal, so they’re heavy. Ideal. Ralph home probably the best and longest-lasting retail buy there is. Immune to trends, immune to damage…—feels very Jake Woolf coded.
Obs 131: Prototypes
This Nancy Henderson prototype wall sculpture in Vegas, ending Sun, flat shipping—to me looks like a screen, which I love, an Eames screen, but shorter and better. It’s a wall sculpture, befitting a nattily-designed home. (Auction has a lot of sleepers—smalls—that I run down below the paywall.) More than that, it’s a prototype, which are the best item to search for when buying something unique for your home. Prototypes—you know what they are. One of one or early-issue pieces that were not produced. They’re not very common, but for whatever reason, they’re all over auction sites—a search right now yields a few hundred items, the best of which include:
An Ettore Sottsass Christmas tree stand (bet your ass didn’t know that existed)
A Rudolf Glatzel 885 chair (new to me, but I love his bar cabinets—the only instance of HARSH Danish furniture?)
A 1920s tea caddy (similar to what I found in this deco auction here)
This chair—perfect haughty design auction title: Gruppe Pentagon, Prototype chair for the Café Casino at Documenta 8—seen below:
It goes on forever on LA… too many prototypes out there for them to be sequestered to one aesthetic, but if you keep them in mind you’ll doubtless find something very good.
Big font—what can be found below is as follows: 100 curated pieces of design, comprising items across all spectra of furniture, home goods and smalls and this week, specifically: sofas, settees, chairs, lamps, outdoor furn., credenzas, storage, full sets of china/dining wear, collectibles/jewelry—all of which that is worth buying, or knowing about for stylistic or canon or aesthetic reasons, with design eras beginning in 1874 or so and running through about 2002.
What’s exactly on the block this week? The rarest classic modular wall-shelving system that’s available on the market (think Braun or USM but slicker and lighter), the best Vladimir Kagan piece (by wide margin), a 1980s arts and crafts chair but for Knoll that should be in MoMA (and which is at $60), a handful of characteristically opposed and different pieces by Gio Ponti… an avant-garde Kubrick-type chair that never sells for money… an 1800s bookshelf that is actually an item designed by Memphis Milano if it was in BRAZIL… a wild vertical flat file that’s a century old (think DECO), cheap vases, a Pierre Cardin piece from the Concorde, Artemide sconces for nothing (local) plus a semi truck’s worth of deals, investment items and mistake auctions (mislistings; auctioneer error), rare no-bid items, one-in-a-thousand odd design lots and the like.
