Observer 085: Where to start when everything in your hut feels mid

Hair of the Dog

Good Saturday morning. Nice weather out finally, at the beach today for a little bit and the greatest retail experience in New York: Tashkent Supetmarket. Straight to housekeeping:

• Q&As will return in a couple months or so, on the regular two-week schedule. I will be evolving these into “seasons”—not every other week forever, but most of the year, every other week. Get in touch if you want to nominate someone for a Q&A. If I sent you a Q&A, and you haven’t filed… well, do it by July.

• I’ll be at 3 Days of Design in Copenhagen on Tues. and Wed of this upcoming week. Let’s connect!

• A Q&A I did for Hypebeast Magazine with the power triumvirate of New York vintage sellers—Fantasy Explosion, Intramural Shop and Leisure Centre—is online. They discuss vintage as a business and way of thinking. Here’s some more info and access to all their accounts:

  samisreiss

  

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• I also wrote up of my favorite design pieces of this past year, for GQ, for their annual Home Awards package.

• Shouts out to my friend

  Chris Gayomali
  for launching his Substack, Heavies, which covers wellness and health. Consider subscribing for fine dark nutrition content… mine’s only 3/7ths ready:

• I would like to ask readers with an open mind to listen to the music of Eternal Champion and Sumerlands, two great bands, whose bassist, Brad Raub, an incredible and singular person, passed away late in May. Without being woo-woo about it Brad had the best energy of just about anyone. Listening to someone’s music or consuming their art is a far cry from knowing them, but this is what Brad did and loved, and he left behind a fine and substantial, and elevated, body of work. I didn’t know him well enough to say more than that. But I really liked him a lot. An amazing person who will never be forgotten. Much love to his family and friends.

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Obs. 85

Trying out a different variation of the Observer this week… little more direct thought and then some of the auctions. Ideas as the lead, to to speak. I don’t love writing essays, frankly, because they almost always start from a negative value proposition, or are too over the top in terms of joy. About culture anyways. It might not be all true, but it’s how I see it. A writer will say either something sucks ass and is a rip-off and is worth poking holes in, or is the best thing ever. Many things are one or the other, to be sure. But I find it hard to get that naively excited about anything, positive or negative… I mean, maybe now and then. Most concretely I don’t love writing that way. It’s a false dichotomy. I like the neutral positivity that I find seeps out in the Observer auction writeups. But in those the idea is always hidden. It’s better when the idea is up front. Trying this….

Where to Start: OR: There is so much stuff to buy: OR: Avoidance: OR: The Tranches of Furniture: OR: Why buying accessories sucks

I was looking at the auctions this week… some good stuff in there: Ponti flatware, a number of elegant Haeger vases, some Hoffman seating, some McCobb, a couple of good planters (planters are always ideal ways to experiment with no-name designers), good office gear, enough chairs to sink a dinghy, bright shiny Italian things and so on…. and in the meanwhile, as I was jotting down these things for the recommends at the bottom of the letter down here (below the jump), I was also doing some odd fixing up around my house. I have a nice little apartment, but as is the case with a home living situation, something always comes up. Just a couple weeks ago, the paint—contractor white—peeled off in the doorjamb, either from the heat or from my trusty chin-up bar, so I repainted the doorway. This takes time. Two coats of primer, each with a twelve hour wait, and then two coats of the paint. Then some cleaning. What ended up happening was my hut, for the past two weeks, and indeed still today, has been in a state of chrysalis, maybe… of halfway. Boxes everywhere, the Boby not where it usually is. I also then painted some of the kitchen, what with me having the super’s big paint bucket still, and finding a small spot on the wall above my stovetop that’s turned the color of buttermilk/shortbread, like a real life chef’s kitchen, probably from all the tallow flying into the air when I make dinner. As I walked around my small hut in its bridgelike stage I noticed a number of things for the first time in a while that I should upgrade. Looking around, the following things are no good:

• Dish rack. I bought this plain black dish rack a decade ago on the recommendation of The Wirecutter, around when I moved in. Like absolutely everything else they recommend, it was completely worthless. It’s not a good dish rack, and it doesn’t look any good to boot. So I need a new dish rack.

• Knives—I got a nice set of knives as a gift a few years back. They’re great, but not good enough. I cook now and then and would like one of those knives that is good enough to cut a tomato to the width of a single blade of blond hair. When I lived in Los Angeles, the place I stayed in had one.

• Kitchen table—I have a pretty good table: it’s round and orange, minimal and pretty modern. I think it was designed for outdoors; it is some sort of patio table. I like it and believe in it. But I could do better.

• Salt and pepper shakers: I bought these miniature Coca Cola bottle-shaped shakers from Zabar’s a couple of months ago because I didn’t want to leave empty handed, and all they had in there was pasteurized cheese and seed oil snacks. (I was going to the gym so I couldn’t get any fish.) But they’re too small. I go through a lot of salt; I should have bought something from Bitossi; now I am sure I probably will.

• Kitchen chairs—I have these decent Herman Miller school chairs that I bought something like a decade ago. One I found on Douglass St. off Smith on the last day of school years ago. I like them but they could be better.

The list goes on and on. I say this as… someone who… I like what I have. Some I like so much, like this old Pelota lamp I got, that I check the piece out for an extra split second when I enter the room. Puts me at peace. Everything that’s big in my small hut, aside from the kitchen nook, I like. But even then I have like a dozen legitimate items to buy. It is somewhere between stifling and depressing. I have been putting it off; being avoidant, ignoring them, focusing on other parts of the house, so much that I only notice what’s missing when the place is in disarray.

I have been wondering what might be at the root of all this. I am a bit more critical about furniture lately than I was, say, last year. Is design ever going to be big? Big like clothes? Is it going to be frictionless to buy stuff? Is there going to be real information out there? Probably yes and soon. But I do wonder how scalable such a… schedule of purchasing is for regular consumers: Can we, as normal working people with jobs and time constraints and sometimes narrow doorways elevate what we have in our homes very easily? I was reading this

Blackbird Spyplane

essay from a few weeks ago, in fact right around the time my chin-up door went to pot:

You are not a commercial for yourself

In which Jonah writes about the limits of consumerism and so-called connectivity:

…clothes also affirm the creative ingenuity and labor of the people who made the fly s**t, weaving us into a social relationship predicated, at bottom, on celebrating and sharing what’s best and most beautiful about human creativity.

[But] where things get muddy is when our healthy desire for beautiful man-made things — intimately connected to our healthy desire for connectedness & community — gets hijacked and zombiefied by manipulative, profit-hungry, fundamentally anti-social souls…

His emphasis… Is it true? I don’t know, probably is. But as far as design and furniture goes, it doesn’t entirely ring a bell, since it hasn’t gotten there yet. Maybe if you work in the industry. But the essay just shows the gulf between the two fields. There’s not as much velocity, and there’s barely a fake community built up around design… it hasn’t been beaten into the ground much… it is right now just people and the stuff in their huts.

Which is a hobbyhorse of this newsletter… it’s like this because of both the logistical challenges of amassing furniture and how many design items there are for people to upgrade. Specifically… getting back to my personal to-buy list: I could probably buy all of this garbage today easily, with a little bit of work, and even get things I could believe in. But the bigger pieces—the chairs and the table—are more difficult, especially since they’re to be upgraded. Nothing is that hard in life if you’re healthy, but this crap is a pain in the ass. I say this as someone who spends a good chunk of time on most days of the week working in and thinking about furniture, talking to designers and shippers… it would probably take me a couple of weeks of real work to find stuff… and this kind of logistical shit is low-key a pain in the ass.

So the question becomes what to do. In this letter, since Day 1, I’ve tried to paint a rosy photo of furniture and design and the process of buying this stuff. Mostly because everything is hard at first but gets easier, and when you get the right piece the hard work is worth it. And, on top of that, the work isn’t that hard. It’s just not Obama-admin app-chud brain seamless. It’s not rocket science to bid on a sofa on your phone, email the auctioneer about shippers, and then call up a shipper and say, “Steve, it’s Jerry, I won an Anfibio from an auction house in Mills Landing, Pa. I live on the first floor of a handsome West Ham-colored building in Carroll Gardens. How much do you and your goons charge for delivery? Best time for me is next Friday before 3:30 so I can leave to pick up my raw milk from these Mennonite farmers who love me.” I have that exact conversation almost every day. It’s not hard. But it’s not seamless. There’s more elbow grease involved than buying shirts and pants off Grailed or TheRealReal.

This is paired, I think, with the lack of real available information and clarity about different tranches of furniture. (Shouts out Michael Lewis.) What I mean is… how to upgrade? Again, I’m not Credenza Jesus but I have decent stuff and know a sliver hair length about furniture. But I’m at a third of a loss as to what might replace these Miller chairs. I don’t have a list of 25 items off the top of my head. Thinking off top: whatever is coming next needs to nominally be a side- or a kitchen chair. So lots of the crazier crap out there is out. The black HM ones are shittier than the ones I have, and a tranche below. Cescas are maybe a tranche above… maybe. But I’m not in love with them. And also they don’t really go with anything I have in my hut—or, rather, they are not in enough opposition to anything I have in my hut… and so therefore would not work. I could do a Thonet. I should get a couple. Or how about… couple of tranches above, let’s say, Joe Colombo’s Universale chair. Especially in green. But these too present a problem. They run for money, so I’d have to spend money or put in some time. And when I get them I’d be spurred into upgrading my table... and so on. Much of this is not exactly acidic thinking, but it’s a bit subtly negative—reasons not to do something—and is, in the end, not real. They are thoughts that go in and out in a fraction of a second: Proustian… though it’s Balzac who wrote more about furniture. In the end, to solve the problem, the important thing is to sack up and stop complaining and dip in to the money you put aside and actually, over time upgrade your shit.

But these critical thoughts are, to be sure, also part of reality… many of us sit in stasis with our furniture… the real answer is somewhere in the middle. There is really a lot of stuff that needs upgrading. So many things—especially the dogshit that gets recommended in the WireCutter—that we buy before the design light really turns on are no good. And lots of what needs improving can be pretty boring. No one goes to work in the morning so that they can upgrade their dishrack. But it’s what’s required. If you don’t make a serious adjustment every once in a while then, you will live in hell. This goes for furniture as it does for everything else… aesthetic or otherwise…

The solution, though, is simple. It’s to start somewhere, and to start small. And to start well. It is best, if things are less than ideal, and we’re not yet at the baroque stage of criticizing good clothing—having deep, conflicting ideals about them… a sign of health—that we should just worry about getting items that are easy to get into your house, and which take up the most visual space, and which don’t require the services of two guys who get hired to cut a sofa in half, or who drive a cube van, and which aren’t as spiritually degrading as figuring out what’s the better dish rack. You should do this:

Get one good chair, one good lamp, one good piece of storage.

That’s it. These are the major small pieces you “need.” This isn’t advice. It’s just the best first way to do this. The reason why these items are the best first use of your time is because… they have deep design histories, and therefore offer lots of aesthetic options, and are advanced, and they are items that get used to within an inch of their lives day to day. Now this way is not necessarily better. Things vary between person to person. And I am just an American taxpayer with a cozy apartment whose chairs are nearing the end of their rope. I don’t have a bulletproof bullseye on furniture. But I like my Pelota lamp more than I dislike my dishrack. It’s nice to look at, and it has a psychic pull that puts the other almost-there pieces in context. Imagine having a good dishrack and not a good lamp? That would be an injustice. A good lamp will eventually elevate all the mid-plus-plus items in one’s hut to permanent pieces. Now, down the line, over time, ideally, everything you own should be good. Maybe. Or not. There are lots more important things in life… obviously. But even if it’s a priority it takes time, and we are working people, and we have to start somewhere. It’s easy to push the to-do’s to the back of your mind and associate a difficult logistical process with buying furniture, or think of it like getting a new dishrack. But it’s not. Smalls and medium-sized pieces are the path. They are easy to physically get and they have a bigger footprint than can be concretely expressed. You can do it.

<Alec Baldwin voice>Auctions are for paid subscribers.