Esoteric Survey

The Mitchell Residence, Buff, Straub & Hensman (1959) I was up in Palos Verdes area a few weeks ago and stopped by to see Nate from  Modern California House  at his listing. This is the second time the house has been for sale. He sold it the first time for the family of the original owners. After ten years, he's selling it again. Fortunately, it's still in almost perfect original condition. That's a big feat in high cost per square feet neighborhoods like Rolling Hills Estates.   A lot of the furniture is original to the house and was purchased at Frank Bros . That includes this Morredi set, the Frank Bros-owned line named after “Maurice” and “Ed” Frank.  The original orange plastic laminate is used throughout the house.  The Micthells and a young Donald Hensman. According to the invoice below, these light fixtures were $8 each. They're in the interior as well.  In addition to that, there are blueprints, landscape plan by Richard P. Gawne and ...

  I just added some new things for sale in the shop , including these things from Japan.  Sign up for the newsletter  at the bottom of the homepage to get notified first when new inventory is listed. And some things not from Japan.

 

  Before the holidays I received an email from Tom Delavan, the design and interiors director of the New York Times T Magazine. One of his recurring columns is called Style Detective. Readers submit a design mystery and Tom solves it.  He was asking about a Pacific Iron chair. Specifically, he wanted to know where one could get the Milo Baughman chair seen in the photo above. He didn't give me too much background, send me the photo, or even mention exactly why he was asking — other than it was related to his column. After reading  the article , I found out it was related to a 1952 Julius Shulman photo of the Robson & Helen Chambers Residence in Palm Springs. It was Robson's own house. The photo is after Chambers enclosed the dining patio. Chambers went to USC School of Architecture and was working in the Albert Frey and John Porter Clark office at the time, but this was a solo project.  Photo: New York Times According to the article, Tom contacted Alexandra Cunni...

The year is starting out slow on the picking front.  I did get a good Josef Albers book Krenit