Obs 132: Office furniture needs to be ugly
It needs to scream DMV/Prada 2001 or else; plus, Kraftwerk guy's furniture
Shabbat Shalom—busy week of auctions today, we’ll get into it ASAP but first a little bit of:
HOUSEKEEPING.
My Dwell column about the Togo (the viral sofa—what might replace it) was discussed on the Business of Home podcast—about 25 minutes in. Great discussion; thank you gang.
Jill Singer, founder of Sight Unseen, just launched her Substack, Counter Space, about “about what we want and why we want it”—tracking vintage pieces, anthropological musings on flatware and micro-trends, interviews, deep dives, and the like. I’m excited about it; Jill knows her shit as well as anyone and has deep reservoirs of point of view and taste. She can write and think. Consider subscribing; her first column, from yesterday is below:
Blackbird Spyplane party in Carroll Gardens @ Ven Space next Thursday for their new shoes (hiking skinhead coded):
They look good. The party is simply another example of Carroll Gardens ascendancy. The best place in the universe. Go to Ven, check out the Noguchi lighting, get some sneakers, hobnob, go to Hadramout and get fried liver for dinner.
And now, onto furniture.
Retail Corner
Buy old, buy new
What if you bought this silk and cashmere hot water bottle (not pictured; use your imagination)? And took it to the gym. And drank Kourtney Kardashian’s colostrum supplement out of it. (mentioned below)
Would that be something you might be interested in?
More interesting to me though is this set of under-office storage (shelf pictured above)—darkly office harsh… not industrial but clinical and clean. It is from Macy’s of all places (who knew). Another example of the aesthetic, also from there, is this nasty-ass office chair—$80—that is legit minimal, not bad, jolie laide... Which leads me to this thesis….
Obs 132:
The Perfect office chair
And the rise of office chic in design—and hideousness
Trends move slowly in design. Slower than in fashion. I think of a note in Feed Me from a while back where Emily noted a corporate abundance in photoshoots—SSense, GQ, Skims posting photos of fax machines, models at the office—and another leitmotif sprinkled in her other newsletters where companies have been moving employees more from working from home to back in the office, and how this has affected the vibe… how this is a good thing, energetically. None of this is controversial; what’s wild is that the note linked above, with the fashion shoots, was posted two years ago. You need the future to happen before business moves.
What’s wild, though, is that in the design world—the buying and selling—the corporate fetish is just puttering along… there’s a slow creep towards it at best. It’s still in photo shoots, jockeying for position with other aesthetics (bubbly furniture; Brazilian furniture; MCM; nothing at all) but really office aesthetics are still, like many design trends, remain in the constant process of bubbling up. I mean we have seen hints of this years ago—I recall Nicole McLoughlin showing off some old Knoll industrial cabinets in her place on her Instagram, and this Prada show from last year... but it’s still, at best, humming along.
Why? Well, the one classic answer: Design moves slowly, slower than most other aesthetic arenas—slower than shoes, than pants, than hemlines, than game worn jeans. This is because furniture is expensive (though not always) and less visible (though not always and heavy (usually/always). But it’s also because it’s harder (unless you subscribe to this newsletter) to find. I will repeat this, as an editorial principle, and as an idea:
Furniture is everywhere and it’s out there. Any style. Any vibe. It’s not being discussed by mainstream people, but it’s completely available, and hidden in plain sight. Anyone can outfit their place in a week.
As for when the office aesthetic might overtake us, might be here for good? Beats me; I don’t do hard prognostication—probably, though, at least 2 or 3 years away.
That’s too late, though. To me, though, the office aesthetic… there’s a reason why Prada picked it for their show there, and why it’s so cloying for fashiony photo shoots. It’s beautiful, sure, and prim, stark and austere. It offers all of the psychic benefits of working for someone else (feeling like you’re getting out of the house, remembering you have some money) without the downsides (the complete lack of purpose that comes with advancing somebody else’s life’s work). More than this, it’s retro, but participatory: we have all worked in offices.
Aesthetically, the best office furniture—like the above—is minimal but in a way that’s different from and louder than traditional examples of minimal design. The lack of adornment on this brutal, grey, DMV/dentist/Prada chair here is economic. Economic in what way?
Well, office furniture, which is pretty modern (let’s say 1967) started out wild as crap (check out this chair I highlighted in last week’s newsletter) and has been in the constant process of smoothing itself out, over decades, into nothing. Into no design… into pure simplicity. Into pure invisibility. Into pure profit. Isn’t that what we all want? Probably. It’s an attractive idea. There are skids of this type of furniture; there exists right now (this week) no better example than this Pilot chair, by Edward Barber & Jay Osgerby for Knoll, from 2016—LA, ending Sunday—which is a very very recent design. It has a simple enough, throwback maybe, but almost grotesque shape, along with (this is the key) its complete 1980s upholstery and coloring.
Which is what makes it. Furniture isn’t a monolith. A decent chair can be improved with detail or suicided by it. The Pilot is also offered in a number of contemporary upholstery options and colors; colors/harlequin style. They’re charming but they don’t execute as powerfully as this one. They’re not as harsh. Is harsh what works? Well, not in all instances, and not for everyone. But for an office chair, definitely. What’s harsher and rougher than working for someone else?
Part of a great auction highlighted in depth below the jump.
Big font—find below 100 curated pieces of design. Chairs, sofas, settees, chairs, lamps, credenzas, bar stools, dinnerware, storage and more. France, Italy, UK, Bavaria, America, Milan, northern Quebec, Europe; auctions in LA, New York, Florida, Chicago, New Jersey, Bavaria as well. Items designed as far back as 1845 and going through exactly 2016.
More specific information on what’s on the block this week. A full complement of bar stools—the hardest items to find for the home—with a dozen or so options, mid-modern, avant garde, all plastic, older style and a hidden Knoll one that I’ve never seen written about or shared ever. An auction with an astounding number of full dinnerware sets (for entertaining) as well as lamps; another that has more Danish furniture than I’ve seen since spring (East Coast) and another (West Coast) that’s strong for museum-level seating. Brand/designer cloud: Knoll, Cassina, Magistretti, Thonet, 1885, Bouloum, full set china, Michael Jordan signed photograph, Paulie McCobb. Plus the always there weekly assortment of severe deals (items worth, investment items and mistake auctions (mislistings; auctioneer error), rare no-bid items, one-in-a-thousand odd design lots and the like.
