Snake Auction Observer: good furniture, undervalued, or eternal, all selected off LiveAuctioneers.com. This week—lots of great items of French design. Immediate auctions at the top, and quick hits at the bottom, but first:
Housekeeping
Interviewed Dr. Peter Attia for GQ here. We spoke about longevity and why medicine is broken. Everyone knows this, but it’s nice to hear those words from a doctor. (Emergency medicine isn’t broken, just the other kind.) Interview gets pretty in-depth. He’s from Ontario, but that doesn’t really come across in his book or in the interview.
In Paris until June. The convent I live in put me on the top floor in the south building, which is nice. Now I can see out into the gun store from my desk when I write and research. There’s a stuffed Fennec fox in their display window, next to a pair of Gore-Tex Beretta sneakers.
Ferrari needs to get it together.
Auctions:
Marc Held coffee table, flat shipping, Cali: Held is cool, he’s Parisian (I live in Paris; see Housekeeping), and an architect, but he’s also designed tea spoons… big things small, small things big. lots of arresting modular furniture, as well. Some smart and stout desks. This auction house says his Primo Culbuto chair is his best known work—it might be. This may not last, though, since we’re living in a snapshot of design understanding. Held designed plastic modular platform bed that may be the best ever designed. Nobody knows about it. I remember finding it a couple years ago and being blown away. A plastic bed can’t last—but still. It’s so good. This table is nearly as impractical, with the pointless balls here; hasn’t sold before on LA. The reserve on is $1,200 and not much more than the list price. Seller also has a painted table (Picart le Doux, a ceramics guy), lots of desk lamps, and lots of fussy French trinkets. $950
Mategot Rigitulle French armchairs, FS, Cali: Here in France (where I live now, see Housekeeping) they just call them armchairs. Great one… Mathieu Mategot, the designer, was Hungarian and some of his work resembled Held’s above—round shapes, dots and circles everywhere. And an even bigger sideline dealing in metal. This model may be his strongest, it drafts off his trademark rigitule perforated sheet metal technique.. as the original artifact, with a lifetime of work behind it, it is the most direct. Slight resemblance to the the Tom Sachs chair that’s nailed up to a lamppost around Soho, near his studio. [Name redacted] has been trying to abscond with it for a while, but may not now what with the news… Mategot’s chairs—he has many:
Run anywhere between a few hundred dollars and in the 5 figures. The one above, the Kimono Rotin, sold for €12,000. Normal photo. Held’s work in metal extends into magazine racks, centerpieces, coffee tables. This seems to be his best-known design? I’m finding it’s an endless well. $1,100, with a reserve a bit north of that, and the Snake Lock of the Week (since it’s so nice).
Piva for Cevoli lamp, FS, Cali.: Sleepy online auction photo of a high-mid-tier design items, supplanted with rough photography and no provenance that remains better than most stores upstate or in the city. The best, most discussed auctions have provenance—a collector, a curator—but they don’t all need to. This one has that—great French design—but it’s still not the biggest need for the consumer. Paolo Piva, the architect, who did the Alandro sofa (underappreciated) and Alandro table (repulsive), did this one… it’s for Stefano Cevoli, who seems to be less a man than a company that has not produced much else. Lamp runs in the low hundreds in auctions; in the high hundreds at some stores. Buying from stores is great and is faster than auction, but stock is more limited and labor is not worth paying for, if you ask me, on a pedestrian item like this. $220
Four bentwood Hoffmann for Stendig 811 chairs, NYC: Very emotional Rockettes photo for a set of pedestrian chairs. Go figure this design is nearly 100 years old—Josef Hoffman drew them up in 1930. He did other masterpieces in bentwood. The true model—there are many variations—seems to have arms and a caned bottom. The original item was mass produced and made of treated cane… one of the first very super modern pieces. Beyond the production techniques, I maintain the design and work and ornamentation here makes the chair go with just about anything. Visualize this and a Magistretti table, or a silly marble one. Or a grill. “Put the steaks on the chair,” someone might say. “The caned bottoms are perfect for them.” Indeed… Hoffman’s work is very futuristic, but only in the temporal sense: it plainly predicted how things look and are produced now in a way that’s accepted and not worth debating. Auction history is spotty… sometimes very cheap; many models. $10
Martin Fineman for Multiplex “bedroom set,” NYC: Another week, another insane item from Bidhaus for the price of a low-level sandwich. Hard to find any info about Fineman, unless you’re in the market for a telecommunications lawyer, but Multiplex—amazing name for a teak furniture brand—ran under the Winchendon Furniture Company out of New England… which makes wood and has been around for 300 years. Multiplex probably their mid-century line. These don’t have a price; only LA history is this exact item having sold or passed on Bidhaus. This is the kind of mid-modern design that lasts a bit longer—the dark wood is nice, and the it’s all quiet quiet. Not very big, about 2.5’ tall, sold as a set of three, with the pulls probably worth more than the cabinet. Always great when that happens. Rest of the auction is wild as usual, but heavy on the ancient metal spoons. Steal at $10
Signed Pierre Cardin notepad, LA: Another testament to Cardin’s design omnipotence… besides the clothes and the club chairs (I openly worshipped them in an earlier newsletter), he made the second-best bedroom set that there is behind Held’s. None of PC’s furniture sells for what it should. Or maybe it just fetches the low low prices that great things sometimes do for generations, in plain sight. (Similar arguments have been made about the Wrangler dress jean.) The only other one of these that sold went for $50 during the week of the Trump presidential election. So… price is undefined. If I owned this thing my notes might say, “Buy eggs / see if man foaming at mouth near ATM will sell his filth-encrusted jacket / one nice thing about Paris is that the steaks here don’t taste like cat food / dialectical explanation for high fructose corn syrup? / remember to not refrigerate eggs.” $200
Quick Hits
Baby LC2 chair, NYC, $600 (decent era)
Prisunic desk, FS, Cali, $950 (French Deco-looking… perfect)
Roger Talon pine folding stool, FS, Cali, $200 (breathtaking)
Very colorful long runner rug, NYC, $10 (Mexican/psych/Parsons style)
Another great rug, not as long, same price and location (Baja)
Thanks for reading.
Snake