Snake Auction Observer 054—Isfahan Persian, Arne Jacobsen, Pratone grass chair—plus Saarinen, Pesce, USM Haller
A cocktail service, cheap Persian rugs, several sofas and the best coffee table I've seen in months
Snake is a reader-supported newsletter covering furniture with purpose, undervalued, or eternal. Many auctions this week: good stuff, cheap stuff, expensive stuff, rare stuff. For a representative sample, catch up on the most recent designer rundown and the latest Q&A interviews.
An improving week of auctions, full season with most people back from Europe; lots of high level furn. from LA and a handful of sleeper auctions (mostly junk, a few underpriced hits); the best of both worlds. The best items are highlighted below. Happy hunting, but first:
Housekeeping:
Auctions:
Lievore Altherr Molina for Arper ‘Eolo’ coffee table, Mn.: Lievore Altherr Molina—three last names, three designers, varying ages, their glory days between 1991 and 2016, mostly having made the sort of post-French restrained upscale office and house furniture that the very rich veer to. (Think Architectural Digest.) Some items, though, have an edge to them, or some wrong notes, or something—like this Eolo table, from 2004. Not sure why it’s listed as coffee—it’s about 4.5’ long—but they tend to take longer breaks on the continent. Why is it designed like a Knoll or Miller office table? Also hard to say. Perhaps one reason why more recent architects and designers are harder to understand is that their work doesn’t have a defining aesthetic or story around it—the work the three here have done is at times boring, at times transgressive, at times quite good, at times looking like an item not even designed by a person, but which already exists. So it’s harder to get behind them. But what can you do. The same house has sold this over and over (maybe buyer never paid?) for $200, $800, mostly at the bottom of that scale. Part of a great auction: Eames chairs, a bad Pierre Paulin ottoman, a slick Baughman burl table and more—worth browsing. $100
Roche Bobois sectional sofa, Chicago: A very subtle, at times without design sofa by Roche Bobois, who tend to make their designers anonymous, or who might just be content to sticking with anonymous design. Is that the right idea? It might be: there’s certainly a logical progression for designers who make smaller and smaller aesthetic choices to end up somewhere completely plain. This way there’s no middle man. Still, with the one side cushion there is something big here. Scant price history—no great info on the design; seems like it’s part of the standard/basic RB sectional, but shorter. Still, fine for an anonymous couch. Register now for this auction that ends today, and which is otherwise full of urns, music boxes and other detritus; Chicago is the furthest away you can get from New York and still have cheap shipping. $400
Arne Jacobsen Cylinda cocktail set for Stelton, California, in-house shipping: I’m making a commitment here to include more kitchen wear when I see it—for one, the items are quite easy to ship, and two they are portable and can withstand moving apartments better than sofas and credenzas. This one, from 1960, is especially great: Jacobsen, the Danish architect who designed the Egg chair (one of the worst pieces of shit in design) has a towering architectural resume (Søholm Row Houses, Rothenborg House, a Radisson near the train station whose outside at least is a marvel to look at:
… the list can go on). The particular set resembles the all-time, colorful Vignelli ABS plastic line Heller but in stainless steel… and predates that collection by four years. What does this mean? Probably just that dishes now are very boring. This is a small set—full ones run to 20 pieces—but five-pieces list often and go anywhere from $5 to 800 (a bigger set, not for tea but service went for half that earlier this year). Pieces are available new through Stelton (and aren’t that pricy). But vintage is better. Also on auction: an Arcoroc octagonal dish set which I’ve not seen, which is nails and well priced, a Knoll conference table, lots of rattan dogshit, and tanning lamps from the 1940s. $650
Charlotte Queens persian rug, LA: Trusty second-tier house in LA whose auctions I always check out; a few rugs in this lot of random number generator items (baroque tables, fireplace pokers, paintings of waves) of which I am not super sure about. This one looks like an Isfahan—same, vaguely, center design, but I’m not an expert—but the auction has no bottom shot, which is how you can tell if it’s machine-woven or made by hand. At this price and with the money around Persian rugs (a higher-stakes marketplace with more guarded information such that it makes the furniture game look like sneakers) there’s no way it’s a handy. Still, a fine price at $200, with a couple other comparable items in the lot. Also if any readers have the Joseph Stalin (with beard) rug I posted on my Instagram a decade ago, DM me—still one of my major wants.
Pratone seating element (Rosso, Derossi, Ceretti) by Gufram, LA (with LiveAuctioneers partnered shipping): Perhaps the best chair ever made: the way it works is that you lie down between the blades, which is what we wish to do in real grass. Perhaps this isthe avant garde piece of furniture most based in reality: it has a nice normal square shape, and no shaggy edges that ignore competent points of classic design (as in it’s not a shitty scribble triangle). No judgment on any of those… it is also Hamas green. Produced in 1971 for Gufram, a conceptural/pop art Italian maker from that era (they did the cactus sculpture in the same color and a coffee table that looks like a stale piece of cornbread/prison soap/cheap brick), it’s the company’s best work. Rosso, DeRossi and Ceretti, the Pratone’s designers, also made the Wimbledon chair (not good), the Torneraj (better; still not good) and Ceretti and Derossi worked on a few pieces together, the best one being this bookshelf (mamma mia). One Pratone auctions a year; this year it went for $14,000, last year half that, the year before, less. How it is. The auction (Billings) is full of all timers and beyond perfect pieces like the Gaetano Pesce foot, a Rietveld chair for Cassina (might end dirt cheap), Vico Magistretti’s Mobi sofa (which is minor and perfect), many more. $3,000
De Sede coffee table, LA: De Sede operates, from a designer perspective, a lot like Roche Bobois: there is a Chinese wall around designers’ names, which makes it difficult for the pieces to rally over the brand’s aesthetic and reach and stand alone and interact with other works by designers. So most are corporate pieces, or at least hewing to a brand. The downside of this is it gets in the way of recognition for the designer—for the worker. While I am sure the guy (probably a guy) who designed this was well-compensated, this is the sort of piece out of which someone could fashion a career. It might be the best coffee table ever made; it is one of the three or four pieces a year that I highlight that I wish I had, and that which, if I felt like switching my place up, would buy and make work. A perfect piece of furniture, nails in idea and in execution. Whoever designed this Ottoman should have been given a diffusion line or more credit or more money. From the same very good auction as a few of the items above; hasn’t sold before; Snake’s Lock of the Week. $500
Quick Hits
Pair Bertoia for Knoll diamond chairs, orange, $200, Mn. (nice rare color on these)
Rosewood Coffee Table by Folke Ohlsson, $1,700, Mn. (big and regal if overpriced)
Knoll oak and re-chromed steel base dining table, $4,200, Cali (still the best)
Stacked slat rattan coffee table with mahogany top, $1,700, LA (this thing is trippy as shit, half ugly, half perfect… I could only see it working in a few places)
Gary Gutterman (fake name? great name) lucite chairs, Ct., IHS (strange, strong and worth a flier)
Eero Saarinen pair of 72 chairs, Chicago, $100 (boring classics; Purdue Boilermakers colors)
Gaetano Pesce Amazonia vase, Chicago, $750 (small, bright and cheap)
Swan Italia lounge chairs (3), $600, LA, LA shipping (pictured; genius… or at least direct, loud and restrained)
Haller & Scharer rare long white USM, $1,200, LA (potential for mega deal; partially listed — no USM in the title)
Thanks for reading.
Snake