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My friend Bramlett of Dallas started me on collected snow globes. For a brief period, I was only collecting snow globes from places that I had never been. It’s more difficult that it sounds. I bought my first of Paris at a boot sale in Cambridge: the water was charmingly evaporating. Later Bramlett sent me globe from the Loch Ness, and later still she sent a lovely book on the subject after we had both returned to the states. This is not a snow globe and probably only a distant neighbor of Nessie: the sticker on the bottom reads: Nature Gems: Horseshoe Crab Your Horseshoe Crab was created by the newest innovation in natural embedments. This prehistoric looking creature is not a true crab but most probably a descent of the Euryptends which flourished about 400 million years ago…
A former client of mine in London and I used discuss our mutual fixation on Campaign furniture –easily folded up and moved. This didn’t stop her from having a storage unit, and it doesn’t stop me from having way to objects scattered and tucked in around and about my rooms and in other peoples storage units across the country. Her storage was in the most glamorous of locations– an apartment building adjacent to the Michelin building in an old maid’s apartment. I had wished I lived there and could imagine myself happy to be out of the cold like Miss Trotter on The Duchess of Duke Street.This folding chair–2 of them–I snapped up somewhere along the way. The ultimate folding chair: leather & chrome. It folds up about 1″ deep for quick retreats.
I’m starting to sell some objects in my collection to make more room for daydreaming. Arrben, Italy c 1980.
I’ve walked by this globe on the street several times and have loved it each time. When I have a hallway, I want a globe like this as a ceiling mounted fixture. Meanwhile, my friend Ms V. who has been looking to replace her upstairs hall fixture –for at least a decade–should borrow this idea for her charming Bronxville home. –Wiliamsburg, Brooklyn.
Negative space is manipulated to form the figure-ground motif of the ladder back chair–that which isn’t there creates what is there. Set of 8 Drexel Heritage dining chairs at the Goodwill on Steinway in Queens.
The scallop is one of my favorite ornamental motifs. As such; and using any chance I can get to amuse myself, I recently designed a simple upholstered headboard for a client based on the scallop to some success. A book I have on the subject is the seminal: The Scallop, Studies of a Shell and its Influences on Humankind. My favorite essay, A Symbol in Ancient Times, by Sir Mortimer Wheeler begins:
“The art of the classical world is strewn with scallop shells. Behind the gracious Aphrodite of Botticelli, borne lightly shoreward upon her Renaissance scallop, and behind the shell-hoods with which Queen Anne’s architects enriched the porches of our London houses, are a myriad scallop motifs in Hellenistic and Roman terra-cotta, metalwork, painting, and carving.”
In Botticelli’s, ‘The Birth of Venus,’ 1478 that Sir Mortimer references, Aphrodite rides in from the sea on a large scallop. She has been born from the foam and the testicles of Uranus after his son castrated him and threw them into the sea. If your starting there, how can it get any better? I love the scallop of the table that is stretched across the cabriole leg. It allows our eye to follow it down and up along the edge; along the graceful curve that is highlighted by a light worn gilt. Not to mention the reminscent egg shape of the table that helps to further our little narrative .
BIBELOTS is my intention to expand a narrative of beauty. A focus on beauty can be lost in the world of design when our desire to fulfill our own singular narrative outweighs a need for suitability, simplicity, and proportion.
A bibelot by definition is a small object of curiosity, beauty, or rarity. A secondary definition is a miniature finely crafted book. These books: leather with gilded imprints and marbleized paper are not particularly miniature; nor are they rare relative to the world at large . Indisputably–in my fanciful world– they are beautiful.
-Solana Beach, Antiques Warehouse on June 21, 2007.
What to say about walking arm in arm?
I’ve been reading Max Egremont’s biography: “Siegfried Sassoon A Life” and one sees that history does indeed repeat itself. In a chapter from the bio called The heroics of pacifism is a stanza from his poem titled ‘To Any Dead Officer’:
Somehow I always thought you’d get done in,
Because you were so desperate keen to live:
You were all out to try and save your skin,
Well knowing how much the world had got to give.
Staffordshire ca 1854 at The Antiques Warehouse, Solana Beach, CA.
I’ve been reading Max Egremont’s biography: “Siegfried Sassoon A Life” and one sees that history does indeed repeat itself. In a chapter from the bio called The heroics of pacifism is a stanza from his poem titled ‘To Any Dead Officer’:
Somehow I always thought you’d get done in,
Because you were so desperate keen to live:
You were all out to try and save your skin,
Well knowing how much the world had got to give.
Staffordshire ca 1854 at The Antiques Warehouse, Solana Beach, CA.
A collection of French and German dolls. My good friend Isabella and I like to imagine ourselves in big wigs all dressed up with places to go. Note the ribbon at the bottom right that reads: …DOLL CLUBS 18Th ANNUAL EXHIBIT 1997 ANAHEIM CALIFORNIA, FORTH PLACE.
I’d forgotten a to post this pic. It’s was a week of activity after my vacation and 3 days in Vail doing an install.
These bottles were particularly gorgeous: stocky but delicate ready to bring forth a mellifluous scent. At Skyscraper. Knowing little about Art Deco silver the handsome man sitting at a desk told me Jean E. Puiforcat was a leading silversmith of his time.
These three bottles perfectly capped would look lovely; if I had a vanity replete with bottles. If I did, I would want them sitting on it next to my Creed, Santal Imperial and my Paratus by Montgomery Taylor.
Not for sale, would seem an oddity in the shop business. One runs across it at flea markets–tagged on the thing that you want. We all become attached to our things. I’m sure many people could explain why: it serves a funtion; it’s particularily sweet.
I remember the dealer with her favorite bowl at the Santa Monica Flea Market early one morning. A friend picked it up and the dealer said when she asked the price, “Oh, it’s not for sale!” My friend, a dealer herself, went on a little rampage the gist being that if you are in the sales buisness it’s best to make the sale. The dealer with the bowl just smiled pointing to the dreaded sticker on the lip of the bowl. Why is the thing tagged the thing you want?
This head of an idealized beauty– I ran across at the antiques mall in Solana Beach on Cedros Ave.–go check her out, I’m sure she will still be there.
