Snake Auction Observer 073: The best week of auctions this year

Kartell, Castelli, Ponti, Wright, chairs, sofas, lighting, tables near NYC and cheap

Late February, the dead of winter, week after a long weekend, with time before the next one, not to mention other federal holidays and Passover, weeks and more since New Year’s… in which houses listed their best stuff in the dead of mid January and it is all coming up on the block now. Haven’t seen a week this strong since late November. (Last week had a dozen or so real hits. But this week has like 50 things minimum.) There are big weeks and normal weeks. This is a big week. Buying furniture on auction, if done right, is always a deal; now and then it can be a cornucopia. To expect below:

• A couple dozen or so undervalued items: Mid-modern, modern Italian, some French, some no-designer wild cards, some ‘90s

• This one sofa that was nearly everywhere a year ago and is now on the block for like $100

• Lots of auctions from New York, some upstate, a couple in Los Angeles, and one with shipping done through LiveAuctioneers (which is convenient)

But first, Housekeeping:

• I’ll be appearing on my friend Will Clifford’s For Your Health show on Newtown Radio show on Wednesday evening at 6 PM (ET). I’ll be playing records and talking about DARK NUTRITION. Raw dairy, seed oils, fermentation vs. fiber, remineralization, plastic, one-ingredient foods, all that good shit. Will’s page:

  uuklyph

  

  A post shared by @uuklyph

• I will state with guarded optimism and vulnerability for the record that this is the season in which Ferrari gets it together.

---

Auctions Observed:

Babele 940 by Raul Barbieri and Giorgio Marianelli for Rexite trays, flat ship NYC, ends Tues…: Smalls are a tough thing to get; or rather, historicize: whereas furniture has a decent amount of accessible writing and history about it—if superficial—the more obscure, smaller items like this thing—Barbieri and Marianelli have a few items, many hits, the Troncoli lamp, Saltimbanco shelving, for Rexite—which are designed as either an afterthought (or just marketed as such) are… digitally marginalized. They don’t entirely exist. Not much info on these things as a class of design. They’re just for sale in a couple of places. This is a sort of penury. It’s a shame since the more I follow auctions and design and consult and write about furniture and do other things I see more and more of the market moving… towards smaller things, much in the same way the luxury market creeped 20 years ago into designer handbags. Hard to have a rack of designer, though not impossible, hard and not impossible to have a dining table designed by an architect in your home. And this is so easy. Anyways, it feels like smalls have already arrived, considering how popular ceramic coffee cups and things like that are. One of these auctions where about 50 items are worth buying; this thing is on its ninth or so re-list. $200

4870 Castelli Ferrieri for Kartell chair, flat ship NYC: I wrote about this briefly the other week (Auction Observer 69) as a perfect chair, it’s back listed again after not selling, this time for a fair price, and is local to New York. $200

7320 series containers by Castelli Ferrieri for Kartell, NYC: You don’t see many nesting items anymore, not really by new designers. Old ones… I dug around. There are these ones, which is the 7300 series: 7324 is the big one… there’s a 7304, too. Other ones in bright green. Castelli Ferrieri did the chair above and is best known for the Componibili. She has a rich body of work too at Kartell. On LA they run a few hundred. In the wild they are Russian. One I have starts at Boris Yeltsin and ends at Rasputin. I’m not sure what changed. No more graduated containers. Maybe you don’t really see nesting dolls anymore because people game now and don’t keep sugar, tea and coffee in the house like that. Downstream this might be why we don’t see any modern ones. It’s a pre-modern idea. This one is so surprising. One, every container is red, which is a critique (or inversion) of the idea of nesting items. They should have variety. Spread out all next to each other they look wrong. When you think about it it is an insane decision. Another Italian triumph. Not sure anyone is as good as getting a difficult idea across so frictionlessly. It’s so inspiring. Ferrieri is one of those designers who should have been given a shot at everything. Disgrace she did not. $220

way more deals after the jump…