The best Italian shelves, why home design is rarely actually ever minimal, my modular column, Observer 088

Plus price values on last week's auctions

Light week for auctions, what with the 4th; heavy stuff was this past week, more down the line this month. This week’s auctions and last week’s values after these points…

• My Dwell Magazine column on modular furniture, and a report on and assessment of Vitra’s new Anagram sofa, a well done minimal modular sofa, can be read here. Thanks to my editor Duncan for the assignment and the gang at Vitra for getting me able to see this thing.

• Left out from the Dwell column was the results and thoughts regarding the rabbit hole that opened up while researching… in particular, the designs and work of Ken Isaacs, who made a gridded out series of DIY-sort of matrix-based rectangular pieces of… furniture is a thin descriptor, but that. Beam systems that can stretch out forever… I like this stuff and aesthetic, it’s a nice corrective to a lot of what we see now, and is also arresting and strong and spare and minimal. The thinking behind it is also great: there’s a book about self sufficiency he published, with instructions. It’s like ultimate interior scaffolding. I do wonder:

  

  Could this be massive? Pretty beautiful, with a geometry that reminds me of Joe Colombo’s Total Furnishing Unit, which came out at roughly the same time. Here’s Isaacs’ book that was a how to… newer modular work mentioned in the piece is a nice early example of the ceiling of what the design can do—the utopian design language—more accessible good stuff, more affordable good stuff that looks good—that Philippe Starck and the like talk about is kinda in this thread. If done right and priced right it could be a new dynamic that can replace a lot of what’s around.

• Also a treat to research and look up work from Peter Behrens, the massive Kraut architect, for the story. A case for the massiveness of design—and for developing new interests beyond youth. Something nice about the ability in later life to interact with high tier work by an all-timer… he was an integral figure to say the least… but is brand new to me (what can I say, not very schooled on architecture)… the work he did shook out the basics of modular living, but early, 1920s, and in factories.

  

  Blueprints are always beautiful to look at, factory blueprints especially. Nice to find a giant every other week with a wealth of work to read about and be impressed by and so on.

• Relevant column last week from

  Blackbird Spyplane
  about mid-modern furniture, mentioning here as it’s his last Copenhagen dispatch… column says if you don’t like MCM, you might be doing it wrong. This is more or less true, hinted at in this meme:

  

  This idea, well-stated—read the column yourself—was tagged to the magic of the Finn Juhl house, the architect’s house, in Denmark, which I didn’t get to see over there. I agree with Jonah about this—it might be the best advertisement for the mid-mod aesthetic out there… the house speaks to me a more than the Case Studys (a bit too striving)… or the Eames structures in Venice, not as much as the Farnsworth, perhaps, but more than some Saarinen commissions... who am I? My taste… but it’s really just something. That house was a key text for me when I began my entry into furniture. These aspects especially:

  

  

  Unreal. There is something invigorating about the angles and space: open and strong and light—a rare combo—while in a house that’s not especially different from, say, some of the ones we grew up in. Just better. This whole discussion brings up a couple points.

  • One—furniture is much different in person; sometimes we are mired in the repetition chamber of seeing a photo somewhere, and maybe some discussion, of a couch or a lamp or a chair, and forming our opinions of that photo, and not the actual piece of furniture. This creates a … lot, including a bias against discussed-upon pieces that are actually… quite good. (Hence Jonah’s essay.) Staid mid-mod is good when seen in a room.

  • More than that, the furniture in Juhl’s house is cool, but the special thing about this house and Aalto’s… is the severe attention to detail to the small things, and the big things, and how quiet it all is nonetheless. This restraint might make the furniture a bit boring. But as an interiors principle it’s so great. Such overwhelming detail is now and then seen in commercial establishments (hotels etc) but almost never in private residences… and so first, it’s a shocker because the precision here in this house this is the sort of attention to detail only ever given to a house bought without a mortgage. (And who does that?) (Some can run this attentive to detail, but when they do they often show it loud… it’s rarely as quiet as this.) And so Juhl’s house is so captivating because… really only luxury hotels get this kind of attention. Not regular people’s homes. Well, what I’ve seen, anyways. Rare to nail down the wainscoting and drawer pulls and light fixtures on the quiet or even invisible side. Juhl did.

• I bought raw goat milk from the pet store the other day, the benefits of goat milk are legion: more digestible than regular milk (or even A2 dairy), high with nutrients, butyric acid… it is also said to be “more stubborn” than cow’s milk. I read somewhere a testimonial from a guy who said he evolved his diet to just raw goat milk all day with a potato and a glass of orange juice. That’s too much. More consistent and detailed reports on this stuff and less left field nutritional and strength topics will soon follow on my new HEALTH newsletter, which can be signed up for here or by DMing me.

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Last week’s values:

Yanagi butterfly stool lot passed/min bid (€1,200)

Loewy bed €1,200

Olivier Mourgue Djinn chair €3,000

Olivier Mourgue Djinn two-headed sofa €4,000

Pesce Tramonto (city) sofa passed (€4,000)—insane

FLW double pedestal desk $4,500

FLW double extension dining table $5,000

Renato Zevi for Roche Bobois inspired chairs, set of 6, $425 (nuts)

Saporiti leather 70s lounger/ottoman passed ($2,500)

Piretti dilemma for Castelli coatrack $1,500

Frattini for Bernini Thonet-style chair (my fav of week) $500

Mourgue Djinn two-headed loveseat $2,000 (in America)

Two Magistretti Veranda chairs in bright red, $750 (insane deal)

Osvaldo Borsani & Gerli desk for Tecno $2,500

Martinelli Coupe lamp $300

Saarinen for Knoll tulip side table $400

Pfister for Knoll exec. chair, passed ($600) weird

Sottsass-type Philips lamp $700

Sergio Mazza ‘Tau’ pendant $1,300

De Sede nonstop snake sofa, massive, $15,000 (legit a great deal)/investment

And items from the end of the week sent out to paying subscribers:

Two Joe Colombo 4867 for Kartell chairs $125

American Indian Hermès style saddle blanket $300

Mario Bellini, La Basilica dining table $6,500

Charlotte Perriand, Les Arcs table $1,500 (wrong)

Adriano Piazzesi (Attr.) loungers and ottoman $1,100

De Sade beanbag chairs, pair, $2,000

Matteo Grassi loungers, side chair, ottoman, $1,000

Franco Albini desk $900

Knoll MR20 wicker armchairs pair $600

Set of 4 Thonet flex chairs, $425 (bonkers)

Set of 4 Piretti for Castelli chairs lot passed ($200)—insane

Francis Mair sculptural wicker chairs pair $600

Nelson bench with chest $1,000 

Vignelli for Venini pendant $700

Barbaglia and Colombo Dove lamp $125 (lol what in the fuck)

Kaz  Takahama ‘Suzanne’ sofa $1,800 

Piretti Pluvium umbrella stand $150

Ted Waddell 7+ lamp $1,000

Kipp Stewart and MacDonald Klismos chairs pair $800 

Milo Baughman modular bench $300

Toshiyuki Kita K10 Dodo chair $300

Eames soft pad chairs, pair, $1000

Gave Aulenti for Knoll four dining chairs $1,300

EIGHT Sottsass Mandarin chairs $550

Josef Hoffmann (attr) Prague chairs, four, $375

Dicky Schulz rosewood desk $400

Cardin style dining chairs, four, $100

Curtis Jere Twin Towers sculpture $375

Tapinassi & Manzoni Ego sofa, chair, $275 (Jesus)

Martine Bedin Super Car Memphis lamp  $1,500

Severe value, severe information. More insane deals follow below.

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Obs 88

One van der Rohe MR10 for Knoll chair, NJ: Ends Tues… Always fascinating really to see the curvy van der Rohe items, these especially, being old Knoll and which keep selling in the $700-1,000 range… a deal if the lot sells near its starting price or higher than that. This one’s like one of the first cantilever chairs (no back legs), a send-up of Mart Stam’s Gas chair (1924; straighter than this) and whose equivalent with arms keeps showing up in these newsletters… van der Rohe called that version “so ugly.” Yes… Seller has a bunch of clunkers, frankly… van der Rohe and Knoll items like this can show up in bunk auctions like this, mostly because of Knoll’s massive footprint back then, its relative affordability and its quality—pieces last. $150; house also has a set of four for $3,000

Gismondi for Artemide six light fixtures, NJ: Tues… A different New Jersey auction from the one above but the same quality and rarity of item… these sconces—desk lamps? hard to find, in any event—two big, two small are I believe Ernesto Gismondi Sintesis, which are more or less his best… stronger, I think, than the Tolomeo, and which fits in close with a sort of more ancient/30s deco aesthetic; though the red ones look distinctly Italian. It’s nice to have that industrial and strong and plain aesthetic. Gismondi had a great body of work; among others are

Below the jump: the best modern and avant and deco items available this week (many for auction near New York or LA), a beautiful perfect Italian storage system, a couple of steals on the mid-modern, all similar deals to the market values above. Plus, Quick Hits (easy to buy pieces in LA or NYC).