Obs 135: No gift guide (and why)
No gift guide, only FURNITURE
EARLY Shabbat Shalom—lots of furniture this week, many items. First, quickly:
Housekeeping:
Spoke to the NO SUCH THING pod about the dearth of good furniture and couches.
It’s a labor issue. Listen here.
I have a short piece about a Kellie Riggs and Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy, two very talented arts curators, in the latest print issue of Dwell, their American Design issue. It’s on newsstands now. Buy it now…..
I picked an Xmas gift (that I want) for the crew at High Snobiety, read that here.
I feel like something else important happened but I cannot remember.
Whither Gifts?
First, a quick note. I’m not doing a gift guide this year for the newsletter. I’m not against the idea: I’ve compiled a couple of them in SNAKE SUPER HEALTH, my other newsletter that covers dark wellness. Gifts that are supplements and books:
And exercise gear and clothing. People love to complain about gift guides. But they are great, low-lift and helpful ways to support independent newsletters. More than this, a legible one will almost always contain a handful of worthwhile and thoughtful items, often items that are more obscure or under the radar and more basic and elemental than the ones picked by traditional magazine front of book. (The incentives are different: newsletter gift guides can be more hyperfocused.)
So why no gift guide here? One, I looked. There isn’t much. Nothing from the design world that is marked down and which is listed on affiliate sites or on retail sites that I follow is worthwhile enough—looks good enough, is classic enough, whatever—to be included in this newsletter. Sounds pompous but it’s not. What I mean is a lot of good stuff current stuff around that might work for gifts unfortunately has no affiliate system—which stinks, since it takes time to write these things. And, conversely, a lot of the heavily-affiliate payment selection of new stuff produced in the past year—is not very good. Or just completely doesn’t fit in with what I generally put in here.
More than that, though, doing a specific gift guide a bit redundant. What is this newsletter if not a “gift guide”? Think about it. Below the paywall, SNAKE is a service newsletter that guides readers and consumers towards good furniture. Important furniture, underpriced furniture, forgotten furniture, canon furniture, cool smalls… deals, investment pieces, statement pieces, fliers—whatever. Every week I collect are a few dozen (or more) examples of the best furniture ever made that, through some online pricing quirk, is accessible for normal people, deeply below curated or retail rates. What is that quirk? Auctions. Why every week? Because that’s just how it works.
What I am saying, very simply, is that every week, on Snake, it is Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Every week this is Crazy Eddie’s. Every week there is a curation of insane prices on goated-tier sofas and credenzas.
Forgive the self-promotion. This newsletter speaks for itself. But it is this. I come here not to drag the gift guide, but to exhume it, pull it out from behind my paywall, wave its dead body in your face, and then stuff it back, feet first, into its tiny pine box for paying readers.
The gift guide is dead. Long Live Snake Auction Observer.
Retail World
The magic of affiliation
This week I like this Mackenzie Childs ice bucket (below) and this comparable Baccarat one (vintage, from the ‘80s). Wildly different price points but the one below is so much GAUDIER… part of a collection with the Vans checkerboard pattern—near hideous—and which works best with deft precision, selection: using only one. The Baccarat item (above), I think, is the winner (it’s clearly the winner) and has a fluency that allows it… to work with just about any style. These types of pieces are my favorite pieces; the ones that slot in with mid-mod, Italian, Deco, dogshit Ikea, whatever else. Set the Baccarat piece against a modern item or a plainer ones or even those with no design at all (translation: put it on a good or bad coffee or dinner table) and it disappears, lights up, both at once. It’s a cold world—you need an ice bucket, even in winter.
Obs 135
The observation of furniture auctions for the week of Dec. 3 2025 by the newsletter writer Sami Reiss
Jonathan Crinion for Knoll signed chair, Sunday: Deeply invisible item, deeply plain… a ghostly chair in a more or less invisible auction, near Detroit, Mich., which has a handful (dozen) strong (forever) items scattered among the clunkers and painting prints.
What’s fascinating about this chair—and another one, same designer, from 1999—to me is the wood grain (lighter) and the shape (very plain, drawing in some ways from the old Thonet pieces). Also: where it fits in with the Knoll body of work; much more backwards looking than other items from that year (this thing). Runs about $600-700 retail. Harsh chair, nice and punishing; rest of the hits from this auction and about 50 other items ending over the next week, (incl. five designer sofas—good ones—in the low hundreds) which will elevate your house to something you’re not ashamed of, are collected below the paywall.
