Snake Auction Observer: good furniture, undervalued, or eternal, selected off LiveAuctioneers.com. This week—a Magistretti, Frattini, a strong no-name French couch, and a harsh, perfect desk… Immediate auctions at the top, and Quick Hits at the bottom… but first:
Housekeeping:
Miami event went great. Here’s a closer look at the display, which will be up for a bit, at Lower East Coast.
I have a few shirts and programs for sale. Here they are:
The shirt:
The program:
The shirt is an inversion of one I made for my previous Miami event:
In 2019. Note: the same male model, the same font scheme—different color and words. That original shirt is sold out, and people keep asking me about it. Don’t let this happen to you—order the new one today. Click on the graphic to buy:
Lots of readers bought stuff from the Pa. auction the other week—super sick.
It really was the best practical auction I had seen—so many great items at a great price, rarely sold anywhere in this country, and close to home. I should mention that a number of the items I didn’t highlight in my newsletter went for a lot of money, and many of the ones I did write about sold for nothing, or comparatively cheap. Take the Colombo poker table, for instance. It ended for $650. You can’t even buy a cat food-flavored steak and nine bottles of wine at Balthazar for that much money. My explanation here is that there remains a difference between attention/knowledge spent on furniture, and actual practical enforcement—purchasing. We’re in a very, very, very young age. I hope this newsletter is getting this across.
Not a bad race for Ferrari. But will they keep it together?
Auctions:
Magistretti Veranda for Cassina, NYC: Wrote about this one before, sold as a set with a matching chair in late May:
That item 404s now and so was taken down. Fake? Crime? Who knows. It was selling for $3,600 a couple days before auction, though, and went for more than that live. I won’t go long repeating myself about the piece, but this color is more luxe; a bit nicer than black. Broader-looking, what with the tall back. Confusing listing here, as the rest of the auction is completely out of sync with this item—all grandma furniture, beat crap. $3,000
Twelve Frattini chairs for Amadeo, Phila.: One of those rare, once-a-month, but really more like biannual auctions in which an enterprise amount of rare furniture is auctioned off as one lot. Gianfranco Frattini, the architect, is a Snake favorite—his best-known work is in metal and his best work are those plastic nesting tables. These chairs are… good enough. Because they’re in rosewood and have some embellishments, they look almost Danish, and are more in line with the wood work he did for Cassina—831 chair, 101, 105 chair—from the 1950s or so. These are the 107s… Nice reality-bending piece: we often/always think of Cassina as a super modern house, and Frattini, and designers like him, as futurists. But it’s not the case with all the work. These mostly have sold overseas, best recent comp. is six for $1,600 late last year. House isn’t too far from New York, and has some excellent subtle pieces, like these great rosewood deco pedestals (man they are dope), chrome loungers that are a bit too much and a gaudy, downmarket Camaleonda button-back sofa and chair that remains charming, if in a gaudy, Las Vegas way. $2,400
French black leather sofa, Phila: I play up non-brand name auctions here, often, for reasons of practicality: vintage furniture made not by big houses but by some regional manufacturer is always and often so much better made (and better looking) than anything that’s designer and is brand new now. But often these pieces are just pretty nice looking. This one, though, is something. It’s from the auction above and I can’t find much information on it. It’s almost a bit too plain looking, but the silver base is a mature touch—you wonder what fiery end or long career happened to the anonymous genius who designed this for a penance. Were they young? At the end? Very tasteful and elegant in the way that most non-branded pieces are not. Rare, rare nothing item that wasn’t a pure sales grab, but which had some design investment. Obviously no price history, but at $700, if you rent a U-Haul and only get a small Gremlin at Ishkabibble’s you can have this to yourself for around 1 large. Goes well with these deco tables linked above.
Panton chairs, stool, Illinois, in-house shipping: One of the better and flatter and most immediate pieces of plain plastic furniture, one that for a long time I didn’t like, but which I now do. Verner Panton is an interesting guy, and not only because he’s Danish, but because he did so much lighting. Between that he made a few chairs that all looked alike. Some were cheap; many had a camp tinge to them—so not all of them work. With the black, though, it’s less poppy, and talks more directly to outré plastic stuff like from Kartell, or the items on auction last week in Pennsylvania. Initially made by Vitra, and then produced by Herman Miller… now available new, again, from Vitra. Pricing is wild on these, since there are so many knockoffs. The HM ones are the best, to me, quality-wise, and run anywhere from a couple hundred bucks to a couple grand (a Hamas green one sold midst of pandemic). This particular one the house has been trying to sell forever; the rest of the auction, with the exception of a couple of consoles, is quite bad. $1,700
Sprunger desk, NJ, calculated shipping*: The universe is made of finite matter but with an infinite amount of New Jersey-based desks that look like they were designed with Satan or by Michael Graves. Redundant…unholy. This one was produced for Dunbar (one of my favorite names), an Indiana company best associated with the designs of Edward Wormley (he designed this:
so dope) and which had a nice in-lay into office and tactical furniture in the middle part of the last century. This table was by Roger Sprunger (last name reads like a typo), who was the in-house designer at Dunbar and whose other work is also rosewood and chrome—best thing is this table:
Which sells now and then. You wonder why people believe in conspiracy theories. But then you surf around on LA and see yet another desk produced in the 1970s coming out of nowhere by some guy on staff at some small firm, everything designed with harsh rectilinear lines (right angles, very aggressive), the kind meant for a summoning, and think, well, maybe some string-puller cut Graves and Sprunger (and Springer…) a check and told them to get with the program and make demon-angle chrome-rosewood tables. Or he had something on them. Since when you sit at one the real evil work begins... Price history hovers around 1 large, tables go for a bit less. House will calculate the shipping for you on the auction page—nice new feature from LA—and also has lots of rosewood, a nice Danish rug (‘70s style, hard now to find), lots of midlevel pieces and this coffee table that is built exactly like one that Magistretti did for Artemide. Maybe it’s that, maybe not. $800
Eames racetrack conference table, Atlanta: What can be said about the higher points of Eames design in a sentence? It’s a very inspiring company because the work is at once very difficult, avant and completely digestible. The legs are so loud… and yet… very minimal, understated, and become ideal after a few looks. Shouldn’t all tables look like this, one wonders. And for a while, they were…Designed around 1964… I think it works perfect as a dinner table. DWR has these (and they’re not bad, frankly), and price history on LA here is all over—$200, 800, way more—with this one here priced at $100. Auction also has a few circular tables—black is best—from the husband and wife, who, truth be told, were more demonic in intention than Graves.
Rosselli for Saporiti ‘Confidential’ sofa, Michigan: I’ll be frank that the best angle of this sofa is the one above; Alberto Rosselli, the architect who designed this important modular piece in ‘72, erred on the plain side:
And that the pics in the auction itself are disappointing. But they’re just photos. Theo lines are an important decision that paid off—the technology here was the hook, less the shape—but 50-plus years down the line, if unkept, can flop over and look busted-down. Piece is still in production from Saporiti… skim through the auction—it’s good, Items of such design, even when beat, always look very good in person, sort of like the Prada gabardine or the one Carroll Gardens bodybuilder at Trader Joe’s. Seller also has Mayan pottery and Marilyn Neuhart for Alexander Girard dolls, which, a decade ago, used to get people’s motor going. At $2,500 this sofa is not cheap, but it’s massive, and Billings sold one this year for $5,500 (leather, smaller), and a couple more in leather have run in the 3 large range lately, too.
Quick Hits
Deco-style end tables by Decca, unique chrome base, Phila., $300
Four Thonet bentwood chairs (wide round back), NJ, flat ship
Knoll butterfly chair in the good leather, NJ, $100, flat ship
Black marble table/console—effective, simple—$200, NJ, flat ship
Alessio Tasca monolithic prism (think Rudi Stern), 21” tall, $400, Mich.
Thanks for reading.
Snake