The dawn of a new age of health and wellness; Charli chair; a fav. Italian brand; Observer 92

And the aesthetic case for lamps that do not emit light

Happy Friday, 83 degrees in Carroll Gardens and the Frances Trollope book I put out on the stoop Monday has not yet been claimed. Good weekend of auctions, comprising vintage dupes (from the 70s, perfect construction, accessible), rare cloth, an upholstery look that is rarely seen or nailed, and, below the cut, designer luggage, a few lots of canon furniture/chairs (close to NY; great), and a like chair with the same color as the Charli record. But first:

Serious Housekeeping:

• I launched my health newsletter,

  SNAKE SUPER HEALTH
  , on Wednesday. It’ll cover illicit/obscure topics in health — collagen, lifting, sun, mitochondria — and will explaining, very simply, and definitively, massive concepts like movement and nature and so on that go undiscussed by traditional outlets. Health needs to be covered with nuance and context for it to be understood eye to eye. Think of it as Snake but organic. Please read my introduction:

  Introducing Super Health, a newsletter covering the edge of nutrition and wellness

  And please subscribe. Free subscribers get writing, ideas, recommends, paying subscribers get this and specifics so they can get there (jacked, having better skin, good hair, the same posture as the masseuse at the banya on 10th, energy) should they choose.

  • I also spoke with my friend

    Chris Gayomali
    at
    HEAVIES
    (full recommend for his excellent health letter) about this launch, you can read it here:

    Sami Reiss on the Deep-Cut Health Books All the Influencers Steal Advice From

• Wednesday will be Snake’s 10th anniversary. I began writing it on August 21, 2014, after work, and on Wednesday I will be celebrating a decade of this at Entrance Gallery in Manhattan:

  

  Please swing by.

ARTEMIDE?

• Is Artemide the most automatic and buyable older furniture brand? Almost everything that pops up by them on auction is either with getting or thinking deeply about:

  

  As in… everything is fairly accessible and works with and complements a bunch of different interior styles. (And works against…) Ernesto Gismondi (Sintesi lamp) founded it in 1960, it’s a lighting company but it isn’t outright… they are very… capable and easy and competent and unfussy. As are many mid-modern ‘editors’ (what Europeans call furniture companies), but there is a directness here and a… smaller scope that makes it easier to wrap one’s head around, compared to, say, Eames or Miller… The lighting they do is the best. There’s not much TikTok lust around Artemide, it flirts with plainness too much for that… lots of their items—Gismondi’s Sintesi lamp which is a nails example of job site design, this Megaron that ends soon… are stark; others, like the Sapper, are almost nothing (actually not a fan of this), and others, like the Icaro sconces (not pictured), flirt with ugly. Ugly things are good, they are the final boss of home decor… we must flirt with them… but we do not necessarily have to get more than One.

  It’s just a blindfolded taste test: if you buy lighting from Artemide, it is bound to be good… yes? This is how I feel, let’s see how wrong I am:

  This is no slight at Eames—I write this before the results of this poll…—my thinking is only that bigger ‘editors’ fail this narrow test because they have made so much. The other portal is that in Europe Artemide is basically Coca Cola… but that is an discussion for another time…

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Auction results

(From last week)

Rietveld chair (the good one) $850 (mamma mia) ⦿ Quistgaard x Nissen Langa Stokke lounger, $1,600 (fair price I suppose) ⦿ Springer style all-marble coffee table (NYC) $800 ⦿ hideous/great/vape pen Ikons desk $400 (huge steal) ⦿ Origlia style Aria chairs $175 (steal… damn) ⦿ Nakashima style tall chairs pair $425 (deal/fair… love these things) ⦿ perfect geometric rug that was gated to paid subs and which is outright peerless:

$200, 7’8” x 5’6”.. not money

Went for $200. Here is the deal with Snake. One subscription, if you are buying furniture, will pay for itself. One subscription also gets the full archive of design insight, auction comparables, and price points. And one subscription is a great way to support an independent writer. All for less than the cost of a matcha and a croissant a month.

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Obs. 92

Aulenti Pipistrello telescoping lamp for Martinelli Luce, Phila.: Ends Thurs (six days)… two of these on auction here from a neighboring town, the one above and one with a black base… I love Aulenti and thinking and writing about her… in any other field she would have a massive, massive easily accessible retrospective. But as it stands we (non-Europeans) just have to take what we can get… the Pipistrello (1967) is a sort of a revolutionary piece thanks to its plastic segmentation… one of the first lamps to do this, and the way its shade is constructed, light is diffused. I would argue it’s even more revolutionary as a shitty lamp (from a light perspective)—you cannot get much reading done with this thing. I would argue this is postmodern… and that the best lamps are the ones that do not emit light… there was a run of dark lamps that began around the ‘60s and continues to today. The Pelota… the more lamps you have, the less light you need… even if they don’t emit light…

Very good. Most important is the… Victorian shape here (goes with Thonet), the flourishes… plastic flourishes. So great. ‘80s items run $1,500, $500 if from the past decade; more if older. House has a selection of accessible Nakashima that is worth flipping through. This mirror (listed before) could be an inverstment, and a set of New chairs, which on some days my favorite piece he did. $600

YSL scarf, Astoria: Ends Tues… I like this scarf, it has the same spiritual color scheme as the Swiss Guard uniforms from outside the Vatican, and no one really (for men) does stripes at this thickness—or brightness—the only item since the Swiss Guard sportscoat (est. 1914) was that one yellow and black blazer that people used to wear to Inspiration a decade ago, and which I would date to the late 1920s… I always gave that thing grudging respect… $50

Kravet upholstery Baughman-style bench, Astoria: There is real paucity around upholstery, both in terms of styles and knowledge. Even more than for design, which itself is quite penurious—we are all renters who don’t have investment pieces, which is fine (it’s a recession), but we also don’t know furniture to the extent we do other creative forms. I barely do… I find out things from auctions, like this one, which is an example of a design decision that places other ones into relief. i.e. … whassup with upholstery?

House has this advertised as a Baughman-style bench, which, with the upholstery, is all it needs to be. The aesthetic on the cloth here is … mod, and by rights is a 1970s piece but there are hints of the late 1960s here (looks like a Mr. Fish London pattern) with the polka-dot pattern… this is just low-key a better upholstered bench than so many of those we see with that option say the tufted teak ones of the 1960s (dinosaur) or Kagan suede options (which we need a couple years to reincorporate IMO)… this is thanks to the quality of the cloth. It’s Kravet’s in New York, they’re an upholsterer, Russians, like fifth generation, still around, and lots of options on their site, though to me the “modern luxe” category sits closest to what we see on the bench here, and is the best. Cheap too, $100

After the paywall a couple dozen items of even better stuff including severe deals on luggage, glassware and lighting, the pop art chair from the 1960s in the Charli brat color (swag)… rarely on auction and local to NYC. Someone buy this with your work card…