Hello, furniture ahoy.
Some news:
Big story on SNAKE SUPER HEALTH about PROTEIN BARS:
Check it out y’all. Also will be covering the DAVID LAWSUIT tomorrow. Don’t eat the diarrhea bars!!!!!!
House Beautiful has a piece here about beautiful home gyms. Half are pretty good, and there are good ideas in them, throughout—light, space, rectilinear set-up. The best to me is this one; the Instagram post might have a clearer look at it all. I do think there’s something beautiful and functional about the iron curtain weightlifting/gymnastic gyms:
I’ll be honest… the Monobloc here is so demonic and advanced. The space with the bars and the colorful plates. Other gyms with their Swedish ladders. Excellent.
Excellent and very helpful piece here in Your Favorite Auntie newsletter where Ed from Lichen explains his interior design to-do’s.
Lots of strong advice, stuff I do myself, stuff they do at their store that works. Really great, this is the kind of stuff you learn after years in it. Bookmark this, come back to it often. Nicely done.
Ran into the WESTPORT truck today after getting a coffee:
What kind of God-tier bullcrap do you think was in this thing? Sneaking some paywall lore but—my number one auction house. More accessible, available strong pieces than just about anyone, and close to New York. A few strong items from their auctions this week, in fact.
Big Ottawa Senators game rn
Obs 143
Need the Roche Bobois Gimp Mask
This gimp mask (actually hand blown by Vanessa Mitrani, Paris based, since ‘98) by Roche Bobois is a surprising piece: a rare, wild example from the company, quite different from their staid, restrained archives (a good thing; luxurious). This is a furniture company called out by name in The Sopranos. And yet this demonic, avant-garde freak mask. What’s up with it? It’s in this Michigan auction for $500. I think they made it late 90s, maybe later.
The mask (sculpture, really) brings to mind, for me, a couple of massive touchstones in vintage. One in clothing and one in design. The design reference, to me, is the head face thing (tête cultivée) by Nicola L, the brilliant departed NY-ish based designer, favorite of this newsletter, the woman behind the Femme Commode, eye lamp, foot. (She also directed/taped the Bad Brains at CBGB’s video from 1982. Look that up.) Dates might match up. The other reference for this thing to me is this top 5 vintage piece, the prize of just about every vintage seller between 2010 and 2015, when I used to write about vintage in this newsletter (my book collects this)… the Eddie Bauer snow/gimp mask from the late 1960s. For camping/outdoors/adventuring. Maybe before or after this sculpture. The Bauer gimp mask is a great piece, designed along with the Kara Koram. In fact I caught a similar piece at Nepenthes earlier this year:
Sexxi. Back to the sculpture. What’s the deal here? How’d this happen? How’d this miracle occur? Not much info about these designers.
I do find that it’s certainly different from how design occurs today. Famously, clothing companies with massive margins and strong brand identities, make most of their money off pieces that are relatively not very designed—like this plain black tee, which according to this reel makes most of the money for Kith—while getting most of their attention from collaborations, one of one design pieces, cars, weird shit, things like that. The eye-catching design loss-leader for press, clout, satisfaction, brand identity. It’s not a bad way of doing business: it’s hard to distinguish yourself if you only make black T-shirts. Crazy shit is not for everyone. So you make the crazy shit, and the craziness rubs off on the black T-shirt, and the consumer and the company is served.
What’s so fascinating about design was that with Roche, their profit drivers were the quiet, normal, reined-in pieces. Not exactly black T-shirts, but nothing as avant garde as a gimp mask sculpture. The mask was thrown in to a collection, because of the profit. There are even obscure advantages to producing at scale.
WINK
A free one for you guys because of the nice weather. Noticed this really strong set of auctions out of Michigan ending this week. The best item here is this Toshiyuki Kita Wink chair, $600, same auction, ends Monday. Nice boring grey leather, infinitely rich and fascinating. The leather manacles, just a bit, the design. Perfect piece of major, twisted 1980s furniture and only $800. This will go for no money. The rest of the hits from this auction are below the paywall, as are the pics above, as are these things:
And the best auction this week, which is just $800, and is a set of two chairs by
