Snake Auction Observer: a reader-supported newsletter (payments are on, button below) covering good furniture, undervalued, or eternal, selected often off LiveAuctioneers.com. This week—slim pickins, with many houses who normally sell good stuff on vacation. Immediate auctions at the top, and Quick Hits at the bottom… but first:
Housekeeping
Picked and wrote about some items for GQ’s 2023 Home Awards, see if you can guess which picks are mine.
Only a couple shirts left. Everything shipping this week.
Takeshi Kitano Loewe ad campaign not bad…
Ferrari—summer—will they get it together—much to think about. But will they?
Auctions:
Hoffman caned Thonet chairs, Mt. Kisco NY: Deceptively simple auction here for two near-identical cane chairs, one with arms, one without, that sit similar to the classic bentwood Thonet pieces but which…when you look… are different. A little more straight ahead and much flatter than the classic Thonet 209; these are the 811s (both, apparently, even with the arm thing here), designed by Josef Hoffmann, whose work for Thonet sits a little more modern than the frou-frou stuff. Price history is cheap, like $150 per… the reassurance here is that there is actually a genre of wood cane furniture that’s under Thonet that is broader than just very old stuff, and pieces like this, which some sellers date to the 70s (check the tags for the details; these things go mad cheap though, so hey) are the missing link between fussy (and perfect) 209s and the more muted cane Breuer chairs that most of you have seen and which have a larger modern footprint. Seller has lots of rugs, porcelain angels, one of those silhouette profiles from the 1930s that you sit in front of, a Ralph Lauren 1930s cardigan (with the flag on the back) and lots of junk. $25, ending Wed. AM
Saporiti chair, Florida: One of the best chairs I’ve seen in a while, on LiveAuctioneers at least—no real name, and with a bit tricky a history of brand. This was designed by Giorgio Saporiti, who is the younger brother of Sergio Saporiti… Saporiti the company is Sergio’s company… sort of a black sheep situation. Lots and lots of great Saporoti (the company) items, including some of Alberto Rosselli’s best work; this chair and both brothers’ work fits in well with their Italian contempos. Giorgio’s stuff hasn’t sold quite hard domestically—though il Loft, the company who made this chair, is active with decent output as far as new items go. I have never seen it on auction, or written about by someone else or covered in a magazine, or on an Instagram account, or even in the wild, looking for other stuff. This rarity speaks to the special nature of furniture, and is why searching for items lately can be so cloying, and so satisfying. Even very rare and never-before-seen pieces of furniture are produced by pretty big companies and designed by renowned creative people, yet they nonetheless remain harder to find than death metal records. This makes furniture the perfect item for a world defined more by knowingness than knowledge. (The really rare and underground stuff, I assure you, is out there. It’s not furniture.) And yet though Sapo is a big name, and this chair was produced like, by a furniture factory, it’s very hard to find.
Chair is among the better pieces that the brothers have pushed out, with a nice tension between its positivity/optimism—let’s say lightheartedness, this isn’t grave—and the direct expression that it has because of its angles here. Does this make sense? Fun, strong, but not too much of either; really it’s own thing. And it’s not so out there that the designer gets let off the hook. It’s a wild card in an auction that also has a set of Constantino Pietro side chairs among estate jewelry, women’s designer clothing (like teal Chanel dresses), fake Karl Springer furniture, crystal, vases. Snake Lock of the Week at $50
William Krisel AIA table, LA: Very capable and harsh office table that works better as a dinner table (as all office tables do), which is designed by William Krisel, a new designer to me, for AIA. Krisel was an architect who did a lot of tract housing and cheaper condo buildings in Southern California and in Palm Springs. He liked open floor plans. This table seems to have been done for the American Institute of Architects, for whom he was pretty involved. They made furniture? That’s cool. These fit in square with the Eames table from last week that I said should be in the kitchen—as soon as you do that, it’s a mature stylistic decision. One thing about this newsletter is I couch bigger ideas in the middle of paragraphs that are tendentiously about pieces of furniture and not in the headline, and I’m doing that still here, but am pointing it out here, very explicitly… that you can break rules and advance and buy whatever it is you want. Tell everyone that this newsletter is price alerts only in structure. It is really about more than that.
This would match well with plastic chairs, in my opinion (like the Magistretti Selene listed in Quick Hits below, but not clear; or the Colombo Universale), since this would show two different and complementary points on the arc of utility and aesthetics. How to explain that sentence? I just know, you see it or you don’t. Both are pretty functional, but they take opposite aesthetic roads to that function… so it’s a counterpoint but not a clash. Very very simple. One sold for $400; house has a potpourri of boring seating, couches one sees in new hotel lobbies in midtown—brass, leather, beige: just about everything boring is in here—lots of gold (incl. great Hermès) and the Kirsch/Hamilton clock I wrote about in #32:
Albeit in a dowdier color. I love this Krisel, and will look out for more as I go; $300
Mies van der Rohe chaise lounge, CT, in-house shipping: Pretty special one here: a chaise lounge from MvdR, fun and exciting in the way his furniture is at its best, though his work is never presented like that. Shouldn’t it be? Of course, not all of van der Rohe’s furniture was about being fun. But, well, some of it was—sucks to be on the other side of that argument. Another way of formulating that idea is by asking: what isn’t Italian about this? It’s direct and open, takes a little bit of the piss, isn’t super avant… it’s more exciting than his daybed (worst piece by him), and more jumpy than the just lounge… it could be a darker Milano 1965 or 1972 piece.
It has become more and more difficult in America to get and track down good loungers or daybeds. The best ones, as with everything, get designed in Europe or by Europeans, but the problem here is that with chaise lounges they all just get sold there. Now I don’t think it’s a big deal if the best items are overseas—just use a proxy and stick out and live life a bit better—but cost on foreignly-held furniture is prohibitive. Shouldn’t a lounger or chaise be easier to find in America? We need to relax more. Why stretch out in Italy? It’s redundant. No one works hard over there to begin with. These ones run between a couple and three grand, with a few models that don’t have the arms (sleeker) sitting at the high range. Special item, and still in production by Knoll. House has some nice Stendings, these unreal Arne Norell loungers (never seen before, really good), and lots and lots of Regency. $4,000
Peter Shire Memphis menorah, SC: A few years ago, around the time that chick from the magazine made the direct to consumer cookware that was basically La Creuset but with app colors, I was talking with my GQ editor and friend Sam and my friend Corban about how few good menorahs there are out there on the market, and how even a D2C brand, all of which are stylistically reprehensible (my opinion alone) it could do pretty well. The bar is very low for menorahs. Why are there not any nice ones? I looked around for a long time. They all hew to very gilded design, or traditional, which is pleasant, but not nice—maybe it doesn’t have to be, but this is beyond the scope of this letter—or, if they’re modern, are just super imposing, sterile and flat. Think about the Georg Jensen one. It’s beat; only acceptable on a curve. There should be good ones since they are going to be out there for eight days. Anyways, this one turned up. It may be the only great menorah designed within the past century; at any event, it is at the top of the list. Shire is one of the greats, he has the best Apartmento spread there is (I remember he had banker-stripe sheets on his bed; very hard to find), he was down with Memphis Milano, and he was quoted in a golden-arc era issue of Snake (around '99, near the end of the book, 2018) about his house and work and even Dodger Stadium. Other newsletters, I don’t know what they were doing back then. Well, I do and you do. But why be negative?
This menorah sold twice, for $600 and $650 in the past few years, and I think I am onto something; the house’s selection is more up the middle, though a few quite great Mizrahi and Palestinian necklaces jump out from the lot. $2,400
Quick Hits:
Pesce Summer L vase (1995), $275, Florida (affordable entry into mastery)
Sonneman for Kovacs black table lamp, $200, LA (another #BobbyBargain)
Chuck Pfister for Knoll club chair, tan, $150, LA (solid, plain, quiet chair)
Mateo Grassi king platform bed (2008), $300, LA (understated, luxe, cheap)
Karl Springer wood end table, $500, LA (perfect)
Saarinen for Knoll tulip table, four chairs, old, sticker, $600, Wisc. (deal if real)
Old Ace Hardware workbench (w tasteless joke sticker), $40, Wisc. (rly good)
Magistretti “ghost” Selene chair for Heller, $20, Glen Cove NY (great deal)
Thanks for reading.
Snake