Friday, May 25, 2012

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The Art of Shopping: Working Warren with a Pair of Pros

We all shop, but shopping with someone who actually makes a living buying stuff is an entirely different game. For one thing, the pros notice subtleties we pikers would be likely to overlook, such as the fine print on the $900 price tag dangling from a ‘50s floor lamp that’s shoved into the corner of a cramped and dusty shop on Warren Street in Hudson. Faced with such seemingly irrefutable evidence, many would conclude that $900 is the asking price. Not Paul Siskin, of Siskin Valls, an interior design firm in New York City.  “How much?,” he asks.  Mark of Mark’s (612 Warren) replies, “$150. And, as you can see, the price tag from [he names a chic store in the neighborhood that recently closed] is still on it.”  Sold.
 

                  Mark with his “$900” lamp; $150 later, the lamp chez Siskin.
 
A recent foray on Warren Street with Siskin and his friend and frequent collaborator, the architect .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address), was a lesson in the close reading of price tags, among other occult arts. In Larry’s Back Room at the same address, Chan spots a pile of industrial artifacts, each with a red SOLD sign attached. She says to Siskin, “I see Restoration Hardware got here first.” That chain, which specializes in mass-produced knock-offs of the very sort of off-beat, unique pieces designers pride themselves on unearthing, is a source of considerable irritation to the pair. Larry points to an iron bed and assures them that its finish isn’t faux: “This is genuine rust.”
 
At Red Chair (608 Warren), a New Hampshire antiques shop transplanted to Hudson last fall, Siskin makes his first pronouncement of the day: “This is the biggest bargain in town.”  He is pointing to a French bistro garden table and a pair of benches (right), with their original green and brilliant yellow paint. At $495 for all three pieces, it’s hard to imagine a chicer, cheaper way to furnish a casual dining area, indoors or out.  Even more remarkable: Siskin’s palpable excitement. Despite having trudged from shop to shop, showroom to showroom, for the last thirty plus years, his love of the chase is undiminished.
  
As we cross Warren, he points to where we’re headed, Bavier Brook (621 Warren), specialists in antique and vintage jewelry, and says sotto voce, “Joan keeps this place in business.” She hears and counters,  “My mother taught my five sisters and me that if a woman doesn’t own jewelry and real estate, she isn’t Chinese.”
 
Chan especially likes this shop, she says, because, “They have great taste, and they are affordable.”  A few weeks ago, she purchased a beautifully crafted amethyst ring here.  “The stone is cabochon cut, so it’s a little more discreet than your average cocktail ring,” she says.  “And I love the 1960s setting.  It makes me feel like Twiggy.”
  
Note this salient difference between professionals and the average tire kicker: Instead of dithering endlessly, pros actually buy stuff; lots of it, both for their clients and themselves. Siskin is still in the process of furnishing his own just-completed house a little south of Hudson City proper on Mt. Merino, a long, low modernist design on which he collaborated with Chan. The decor consists of things he’s long had in storage (some of them client rejects) combined with new (to him, at least) Warren Street finds.  The sole exception, so far, is a large sofa from a chain store that shall go nameless. (Suffice to say, it’s notorious for its designer-find knock-offs.)  However, there’s still one major piece missing—some sort of storage piece for the dining area. Today, Siskin will revisit some leading contenders, while continuing to cast his net for new possibilities.
 
At Gris (514 Warren), where months earlier Siskin bagged a brilliant ‘50s French canape with original leather upholstery (right, in his house), he considers a Chinese cabinet. A raised eyebrow from Chan lays that to rest.  At Vince Mulford (417 - 419 Warren), he looks once again at an overscale chest of drawers (below) that he’s been circling for weeks. Like nearly all the objects in Mulford’s monumental space, this one would make a fantastic accent piece in a vast modern room, precisely what Siskin has. But drawer space is not his top priority; dish storage is the more urgent need. At Skalar (438 1/2 Warren), he examines a French ‘50s oak sideboard (top photo), but rules it out because of its shape—horizontal whereas his space cries out for a vertical.  At Foley & Cox Home (317 Warren), when store manager Nancie Shelhamer notices Siskin hovering around a tall 19th-century dark wood cupboard with shelves, she casually mentions that the piece is on sale.  As it happens, the price beats all other contenders so far.
  
Even so, Siskin hesitates.  He can’t yet see the piece in his place. Chan tells of once seeing some tiles at the aforementioned Mark’s. Though she loved them, “I couldn’t figure out what to do with them.” Weeks later, in a taxi on her way to the airport to board a plane for Malaysia, inspiration struck. “I’m renovating my own apartment, and, I thought, they’d be wonderful as a mantel surround.” She called Mark from the car and asked him to hold them for her. 
 
Perhaps this propensity for ultimately closing deals is what earns the pros a more animated reception at the shops of Warren than one may be accustomed to. At every store we enter, they are greeted warmly, as if they and the store owners were the oldest and dearest of friends. And indeed, they practically are. As checks change hands, promises of free home delivery that very afternoon are met with cries of, “Stay for a drink!”
 
Such is the case at Theron Ware, Works of Art (548 Warren).  While Chan buzzes from blossom to blossom, hovering over a perfect square mirror here (right), an exquisite Queen Anne table there, Siskin closes the deal on an oval silverleaf-framed mirror he’s had on hold for a client. “I get a lot of mirrors here,” he says. Chan adds, “Antique mirrors are better than the ones made today.  They have thicker glass and the mercury backing isn’t so perfect.”
 
“Shopping here is so different from a place like Vince Mulford,” Siskin says. Mulford’s shop is large and sparely filled with one showstopper after another, whereas Theron is small and packed to the rafters with exquisite things. “Here you really have to look.”
 
Yet different as they are, the two stores apparently have more in common with each other than they do with most of the antiques shops in the city.  “The rarefied air of some of the New York shops can be suffocating,” Siskin says.  “Most Hudson dealers specialize in pieces that are decorative and stylish but not too serious—neither the pieces, nor the prices.”
 
Passing Hudson City Books (533 Warren), a mix of expensive rare books, first editions, and more affordable used books where, they tell me, Chan recently got her daughter’s graduation gift—a vintage leather-bound set of Jane Austen—Siskin slips back into pronouncement mode: “This is the best bookstore in the world.”  An hour later, after stopping in all-too-briefly at Chris Lehrecke (415 Warren) so Siskin could check on the progress of a daybed (similar to the one above) he’s having made for a client in the Hamptons, we enter 12 (318 Warren), a wonderland of exquisite things, including vintage couture, and antique jewelry, furniture, art, and accessories. While some in our party are detained up front, mesmerized by a pair of 18th-century diamond-drop earrings, Siskin calls from a back room, “Come look! This is the most beautiful chandelier in the world!”  —Marilyn Bethany

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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 05/09/12 at 06:44 PM • Permalink

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Privet House Hits a Bullseye with Pop-Up Shops at Target

Do you remember the movie The Miracle on 34th Street when Macy’s Santa Claus, who believed he was the real Kris Kringle, advised the department store’s customers to shop at Gimbel’s for certain items? In the same counterintuitive spirit,  Rural Intelligence is encouraging you to shop “local” at Target beginning on Sunday, May 6. “Everyone I know will be at the Target in Torrington,” says Suzanne Cassano, the co-owner of four-year-old Privet House, the über-stylish home emporium in Litchfield County, which will have pop-up shops in some 1,800 Target stores for the next six weeks (or less if their merchandise sells out quickly). How did the Minneapolis-based mass retailer stumble upon Privet House, an off-the-beaten-path destination for design aficionados who’ve come to expect that owners Suzanne Cassano and Richard Lambertson will dazzle them with impeccable objects in meticulous vignettes (which RI discovered four years ago: “A Shopping ‘Revolution’ in Warren, CT.”)? “Apparently,” says Cassano, who also owns Vol. 1 Antiques, “there was a meeting where executives talked about the best shops they had visited anywhere in the United States and somebody mentioned us. We got a phone call out of the blue, asking if we were interested in designing 125 home and garden items in various catgeories for a new promotion called The Shops at Target. We had one meeting and said, Yes!”  (In addition to Privet House, Target is introducing four other pop-up shops at the same time: The Candy Store from San Francisco, Cos Bar from Aspen, Polka Dog Bakery from Boston, and The Webster from Miami Beach.)

Privet House has the largest assortment of merchandise of the five Shops at Target, and Cassano and Lambertson are featured in the TV commercials (see video below.) “We’re in the magazine ads, too—we’re in Vogue and we’re in Oprah!” says Lambertson, who has had top jobs at Bergdorf Goodman and Gucci and now designs for Tiffany & Co.  “I’ve collaborated with a lot of designers but I have never worked on anything of this scale. Most of the Privet House designs are based on antiques and vintage items that we sell here in Warren and in our second shop in Greenwich.”  The Target line (above) includes melamine dishes ($3.49 - $12.99) that look like they were stolen from a shoot for Elle Decor and the galvanized garden accessories such as hurricane lanterns ($24.99 and $34.99) look like they belong in Bunny Williams’ pool house. There are whimsical tiered dessert stands ($29.99) as well as ceramic cheese boards ($14.99) and canvas totes ($19.99) with the Privet House logo.

Cassano and Lamberston are giddy about the twist of fate that’s made it possible to translate their recherché taste into an affordable line of products.  “A lot of the items for Target we could sell right here at Privet House, but we would be able to charge a lot more!” Cassano says, laughing, because Privet House is not someplace you go for bargains. But now, no matter what your budget, you can bring the Privet House look home.—Dan Shaw

Privet House
4 Cornwall Road Warren, CT 06754; 860.868.1800

Click here to find a Target store near you.

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Posted by Dan Shaw on 04/22/12 at 04:45 PM • Permalink

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McTeigue & McClelland Are in the Business of Enchantment

For nearly a century following its founding in 1895, McTeigue & Co. was one of the most respected hallmarks in the fine jewelry trade, selling only to elite retailers such as Tiffany & Co., which in 1990 acquired and absorbed the family-owned business into its own. Yet as he was growing up in Westchester County, young Walter McTeigue III (near left) dreamed, not of taking over the family business, but of becoming a farmer. He thought about farming all through his troubled school days and after, even as he halfheartedly entered the ancestral trade. Then in 1992, he quit his job in the estate jewelry department at Harry Winston and moved to Hillsdale to start an organic dairy farm.

“Fortunately, it did not work out, ” McTeigue says, adding, as if sharing breaking news, “Farming is really hard, and it’s almost impossible to make a profit.”

With farming blessedly behind him, when Walter III told Walter II what he intended to do next, the elder McTeigue reportedly behaved as if he thought (and not for the first time) that, as his son puts it, “I had lost my marbles.” Yet, thirteen years after its launch in 1998, McTeigue & McClelland, makers and retailers of some of the finest jewelry in the world, flourishes. Instead of a large manufacturing plant making jewelry for others to sell from hushed salons in centers of wealth, its headquarters, both manufacturing and retailing, is in an enchanting cottage on the edge of Great Barrington, the setting through this weekend and all of next week for an exhibition of rare, loose gemstones.

“We design and make jewelry, one piece at a time, and deal with customers one at a time,” says the jewelry-designing half of the team, master goldsmith Tim McClelland, describing the very aspects of their business plan that led the elder Walter McTeigue to predict its demise. “We are not looking to go play golf. We love this. We hire people who are going to be part of this family”—a family of nine, four of whom “sit at the bench” alongside McClelland crafting his designs. 

 
 
Bridal represents about 50% of McTeigue & McClelland’s business.  Rings start at around $10,000; the one pictured here, a 5.03 carat Asscher Cut diamond in their Classic Flora mounting, $88,000.
 
 
 
 
McClelland, who apprenticed “under an Austrian taskmaster” at Shreve, Crump and Low in Boston, explains that the metal in “95%, at least, of all jewelry” is shaped via a lost-wax casting method that he likens to making ice cubes—“you can make 100 as fast as you can make 10.” In contrast, each metal element in a McClelland design is heated and hammered by hand, “similar to a blacksmith,” then ground and polished, as if it were a tiny sculpture. In their basement workshop, the only piece of equipment that would not have been used by a jewelry maker a century and longer ago is a high-tech laser welder that permits individually-sculpted elements to be joined with the greatest precision possible. 

Once the metal “sculpture” is assembled, the gemstones that inspired its design are set in place. The 27 matching sapphires in this recently completed bracelet, “sat on Tim’s workbench for a year,” according to McTeigue, before the designer came up with a design that would incorporate them all to best advantage. Similarly, after a long period of cogitation, a set of diamond and ruby buttons became a cuff.

“Walter is not going to tell you this,” says McClelland, “but he is one of the foremost gem experts in the world.” What McTeigue will cop to is being “discerning, picky, and neurotic about quality.” Gem traders worldwide know that when they come across something rare, such as the large, perfect orange sapphire currently in house, McTeigue is one of the few potential buyers who will understand it and know what to do with it. Alerted by a cutter, McTeigue recently bought a padparadscla, a rose-colored sapphire “much rarer than a ruby,” from Sri Lanka. It and other equally fabulous stones will be in the exhibition, which is intended as much to entertain and edify the community as to spark local sales.

In a stair hall of the cottage hangs a world map with pins to indicate just how sprawling McTeigue & McClelland’s customer-base is. And how, exactly, does, say, an Australian who’s in the market for a $50,000 engagement ring find a jewelry store that does not advertise and that is tucked away in rural western Massachusetts? “On the internet,” McTeigue says. “Or maybe in a bridal magazine. The editors like us.”

With good reason.  If a piece of jewelry is a masterpiece, it has a better chance of enduring the ages than a marble sculpture.  But unlike a marble sculpture, jewelry that misses the mark is easily dismantled so its parts can be recycled.  McTeigue & McClelland do it all the time themselves, both with pieces they’ve acquire and with their own self-proclaimed “flops.”  (They chalk those up to R & D.)  But a winner is impossible to miss.  A multi-carat diamond ring that comes across as gently charming is a triumph of finesse over intrinsic razzle-dazzle—a neat trick that only the best designers can pull off.  The great Lalique did it routinely.  McTeigue & McClelland seem to have the knack, as well.  Pieces that, by rights given their component parts, ought to come across as trophies, are something much subtler and finer here.

 
 
 
 
 
Dandelion Puff pin, 18 karat white- and yellow-gold, enamel, and 133 round diamonds, $8,500
 
 
 
 
 
 
Walter McTeigue recalls having breakfast with his father, now deceased, a few years ago at the Red Lion Inn. “He told me he was blown away. McTeigue & McClelland is the real deal”—a highly regarded hallmark that, despite the company’s size and location, has secured its place in history.

McTeigue & McClelland
597 Main Street
Great Barrington
Tuesday - Saturday 10 a.m. - 5 p.m.
Salon Show of Unusual Diamonds and Rare Gems
August 18 - 27
Opening reception: Friday, August 19, 4 - 6 p.m.

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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 08/15/11 at 11:04 AM • Permalink

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LOCAL’s Economy Buoyed By Chocolate Trickle Down

“We are doing very well,” says Michele O’Hana, via a crackling Skype connection from her childhood home in West Cork, Ireland, where, as usual, she is spending the summer with her family. 

“Repeat that please?,” I shout, certain I must have heard wrong.  In these tough economic times, one has come to expect tales of woe from small business owners. 

“WE ARE DOING VERY WELL,” she shouts into the phone. 

O’Hana, a potter who lives in Spencertown with her husband, the photographer John Dolan, and their three children, opened LOCAL last December in the Lenox Commons shopping center on Route 7 “on a whim.”  For the four years previous, she had maintained a 2nd-floor studio in Lenox, where she mixed her own porcelain, then shaped and fired her refined though unabashedly hand-wrought, pure white dinnerware, piece by piece. “It was not a retail space, so I did most of my selling at shows and sales,” she says, adding that the nomadic life, “was not fun.” So when her lease was due to expire last fall, she went looking for a storefront where she could maintain a studio in back, while receiving customers out front. 

Priced out of Lenox, O’Hana settled for a shop in Lenox Commons, where she quickly concluded that her porcelain looked lonely on its own.  So she designed and had fabricated some additional products to act as foils.  She also invited select fellow-artists and artisans with ties to the region to let her represent their wares.  “Before I knew it, I had a full-fledged shop,” she says.

Indeed she does. LOCAL is a find—a charming space filled with a smartly edited collection of sophisticated, well-priced things; some jewelry, clothing, and children’s toys, but mostly objects for the home, nearly all made by hand by some of the region’s most gifted artisans. 

And how do customers, particularly tourists, find LOCAL, buried as it is deep within a shopping complex way out on the highway?  “I"m right across from Chocolate Springs,” O’Hana says of the popular cafe/chocolatier.  “Everybody seems to figure out how to find Chocolate Springs.”

“I already had the antlers,” says O’Hana of the smashing deer-antler-based household objects—trays, candlesticks—she designs under the LOCAL label.  “I have the sterling silver bits fabricated by a jeweler, the wood by a furniture-maker, then I assemble the pieces myself in the studio.”  Tray, $330
 

 
 
 
 
“It’s like cashmere,” says O’Hana of the high-fired porcelain she uses to make her pottery. “It’s a finer material; ethereal-looking, yet more durable than stoneware.”  Cups $20 - $28; Saucers, $18; Pitcher, $35  
 
 
 
 
 
O’Hana supplies the organic hemp-linen that Marsha Pillows of the Drapery Factory on North Street in Pittsfield fashions into bath towels. “They are a big summer thing in Europe,” says O’Hana. A set of two; one hand, one bath, $90.  LOCAL also carries bedding created by the well-known Swedish designer Anki Spets, a frequent Chatham visitor whose own store, Area, is in Greenwich Village.  Complete sets (2 sheets, 2 pillowcases, 2 shams, duvet cover, 1 throw blanket), $830 - $1,100

 
 
 
For the past twenty years in her barn-studio in Ghent, Lauren Mundy has been using modern colors and an old slip-paint technique to create her distinctive pattern-on-pattern redware.  The group shown here, $35 - $160
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
Under an enormous bell jar, a stack of O’Hana’s porcelain—a complete espresso set—becomes worthy of sideboard display.  $350.
 
 
 
 
 
 
LOCAL
Lenox Commons
55 Pittsfield Road (Rte 7)
Lenox

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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 07/25/11 at 02:27 PM • Permalink

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Not Just Another On-Site Estate Sale

This is not a yard sale posing as an estate sale, it’s the real thing, where we get to wander through a large, beautiful, nearly-empty house, picking through the evidence of lives well-lived, in the hope of taking something life-enhancing home.  Between Thursday and Saturday (maybe Sunday, too, if there’s anything left), Sawyer Antiques of West Stockbridge will conduct the on-site sale of an enormous range of furniture, art, linens, ceramics, silver plate (see examples of all these, below), decorative accessories (18th- and 19th-century andirons, brass fireplace fenders, hall lanterns, gilt valances with tie backs, Chinese lamps); cooking equipment (Le Creuset, fish poachers, casseroles, hundreds of dishes, sets of glasses and stemware); 165+ linear feet of books, several signed by the author; designer handbags (Chanel, Hermes, Gucci), and clothes (Pucci, Burberry), etc., etc.  Whether we score something lofty, such as a Russian icon (see Home page), or something mundane, such as some well-broken-in Le Creuset, we will always remember the context of its former life.   

 
 
 
 
 
A splendid black folk art textile.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
  
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Log cabin quilts
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Furniture, including some English pine and several brass and iron beds.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
Silver plate, including some Georg Jensen compotes
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
Ceramics, including 10 of these Spode plates, plus some Wedgwood, Chinese, Dresden, Royal Copenhagen, and Black Knight (sixteen exquisite fish plates)
 
 
 
 
 

The Home of Hannah and Ray Schneider
29 Prospect Hill Road
Stockbridge
Thursday - Saturday (and possibly Sunday)
July 28, 29 & (maybe) 30, 9 a.m. - 4:30 p.m.

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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 07/24/11 at 03:30 PM • Permalink

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Style Shopping: All About Weave

by Scott Baldinger

One of the great things about Hudson, New York, is that you can literally fall out of bed (or your car, if you don’t live or weekend here) and into a new and wondrous world of the decorative arts. Sometimes you may even find worlds within that world. Such is the experience upon entering the tight quarters of Kea-on-the-Hudson, the upstate branch of Susan Gomersall and Azy Schecter’s Brooklyn store.  Despite its small size, it contains an eye-popping variety of sophisticated mid-century modern looking rugs made from the 1950s to the present by various indigenous peoples in places such as Karapanir in Central Anatolia, Morocco, Syria, northeast Turkey, and Persia (Iran).
 
Some of the rugs on display at Kea looks as if they had been designed by Mark Rothko or the Eames. All, however, were hand made on looms in faraway lands, almost always by women working with traditional design templates and materials —primarily wool and goat hair (the latter often combed out into long strands and woven into a woolen backing rather than turned into a thread), in a style totally unique to the represented regions. Due, however, to the not infrequent times of sociopolitical and economic stress over the last forty years, they can also be fashioned from fabric recycled from Western clothing, sometimes made available by relief organizations.
 
Though circumstances and materials have been subject to change, “these techniques and design traditions go back to pre Islamic times, and were passed on grandmother-to-granddaughter—mothers were too busy providing for the family,” says Gomersall.  “What was different over the last century was color—previously the Berbers and other tribal peoples had only red, but other dyes became available.”  Colored fabric from recycled clothing during the 70s and 80s also led to a whole new look for the weavers, who used their training as a foundation for startlingly original, softly shaggy creations called Boucherouites, Arabic for “scraps of material.” Gomersall and Schecter recently held an exhibition of these rugs at their Brooklyn gallery entitled The Untrained Eye: Freeform, Vintage ‘Rag Rugs’ of Morocco.  “They look modern because our own modernist movements took a lot from tribal peoples,” Gomersall says. The Islamic proscription against figural representation was also a major contributing factor.
 
“The market is very much dictated by what’s happening in the world,” says the Yorkshire-born Gomersall, who started in the rug trade in the mid 1970s as an art student studying abroad in Greece. “I do much of the traveling myself to various countries to meet with various pickers I’ve cultivated over the years. But it all depends on the political situation. In the early years, I would go to Iran, Afghanistan, and Turkey.  After the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and the Shah was deposed, I’d go to the northwest frontier of Pakistan, to places like Peshawar and Balochistan.  After 9/11, we had to limit ourselves to Turkey and Morocco. This year, we were about to go to Syria but then it erupted.” 
 
Gomersall met Schecter, a textile designer who hails from Long Island, on much safer ground—a Moroccan restaurant in the East Village in the mid nineties. They opened their Kea headquarters in Brooklyn 10 years ago. After weekending at their house in Germantown for a number of years, they “decided it was time for a rug shop in Hudson”  They will be in their current space until November.  As for permanently joining the tribe of other cosmopolitan purveyors of the decorative and fine arts that currently carpet Warren Street from top to bottom (if not wall to wall),  they both say, “We’ll just wait and see what happens.”
 
Meanwhile, hanging on the walls or neatly piled in corners of the 12-by-10-foot space are examples of an age-old art form brought to contemporary life: two shagadelic Turkish rugs called Filiklis (behind Schecter in the photograph) with long-strands of goat hair woven into them that were made in the 1960s and seventies; the group of those candy-colored Boucherouites described above (pictured at right); chicly monochromatic Siirts from Central Asia; and a stack of plush Beni Ouarains, soft woolen area carpets designed for sleeping that were created by a young Moroccan woman who recently took over over her father’s rug business after he was incapacitated by a heart attack. The series was commissioned by Kea and a woman’s economic empowerment group called Nest. Gomersall mentions that the woman’s father is far from happy, despite the continuance of the family trade, because he is certain that no man will marry his daughter now that she has become so independent.
 
In other words, Kea is not just a carpet store; it’s a petite précis of the adaptable artistry, resourcefulness, and craft of women weavers throughout the millennia.
 

Kea on the Hudson
409 Warren Street, Hudson
Thursday - Sunday; noon - 6 p.m.

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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 07/10/11 at 04:29 AM • Permalink

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Style Shopping: Carolyne Roehm’s Big DeClutter

We don’t normally alert readers to tag sales, as, without actually vetting the merch in advance (impractical), it’s impossible to tell which ones are worthwhile.  But earlier this week, when style guru Carolyne Roehm, author of countless books, including At Home with Carolyne Roehm, sent us the e-mail below, we recalled her last tag sale in ‘08 and immediately cleared a space this weekend on our calendar.  Quite apart from an opportunity to acquire new trinkets for the table, the event itself promises to be a charmer—part garden party, part souk. Even though our hostess insists that this one will be modest in comparison to that (which was shot as a story for Veranda magazine), there will be a stand with lemonade and home-baked snacks, the proceeds from which will go to the Litchfield Women’s Support Services, as will a portion of overall till.   

Dear Friends,

Having just had a “milestone birthday” and embracing some of the ideas from the book, The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin, I decided to do more than clear a shelf or a closet. In my usual obsessive way, I tackled barns and attics, my studio, and the basement. Whilst I am not quite going zen in style (far from it), I am attempting to “declutter.”

This will not be the organized, “pretty” tag sale like the one I wrote about in Veranda Magazine a few years ago, but just your classic old fashioned yard sale, with a mix of things from garden hoses to some of my beloved ribbons and silk flowers.  It has been hard for me to give up some of those, but this is an exercise in editing.  There is a bit of everything.

If you are around the northwest corner of Connecticut, please stop by.

Best,

Carolyne Roehm

When we asked her if we could share the news with our readers, Carolyne added,

“In the book, Gretchen Rubin writes about how refreshing it is to have some empty shelves and closets. That really resonated with me.  Sometimes I feel as if I am drowning in all the accumulated stuff of endless projects.  Some of the things are good, some are so-so, and some are just regular tag sale ware, like too many mason jars and terra cotta pots.”

There will be cook books, as well as other paperbacks and hard cover books, videos, wrapping paper, ribbons, silk flowers, cards, gift tags, good paper and scribble paper, some old appliances, bric-a-brac, some silver plate and copper pieces, baskets, limited furniture, a few antiques, fabrics, buttons, some sewing supplies, silk curtains, table cloths and table skirts, linens, napkins, some table ware and decorative items, old candles, some wrought iron furniture.

That’s the beauty of tag sales—you never know what you’ll find.  If we’re lucky, we’ll nab some good stuff from Roehm’s real life, but, if history repeats itself (likely), we’ll return home with a car heavy with things that just look good, especially by candlelight—the detritus of one woman’s creative life becomes fodder for another’s. 

Carolyne Roehm’s Clearing Out the Attic Sale
58 Main Street, Sharon
July 9 & 10, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m.

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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 07/05/11 at 02:26 PM • Permalink

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Style Shopping: At 3FortySeven Charisma Reigns

The building started life as an art deco service station.  He started out as a Harvard-trained architect.  Together, what they are in the process of becoming—3FortySeven is still very much a work in progress—is already far more exciting than either of those bio snippets would suggest.

Not that there’s anything wrong with service stations.  “I’d been coming to Hudson for 20 years,” says Michael Davis, who has a house in Germantown and a thriving architectural practice, Michael Davis Architects, based in New York City.  Five or six years ago, Davis went shopping for a building on Warren Street.  Among the properties he found himself considering was a former gas station.  “The site was so amazing,” he says.  Initially he thought he’d buy it just for the land, intending to raze the station to make room for a retail complex that would be visually compatible with its 19th-century neighbors.  But while he was working out his idea, the old gas station was working on him—its voluminous spaces indoors, the enormous garage doors that, once lifted, turn those spaces into indoor-outdoor rooms, the unheard of (for Hudson) amount of outdoor space. 

“I still sometimes think about putting in some period-inspired buildings,” he says.  Meanwhile, he’s having fun.  Nary a dull object is permitted through 3FortySeven’s doors.  The front room, where Reos and Franklins once got their tires rotated and their oil changed, has as its centerpiece an enormous chandelier by the Cincinatti glassblower Jason Weins, a spiral of industrial-salvage metal, resplendent with pendants of roughly pressed glass.  Against one wall, a prim black lacquer and gold-wash Dorothy Draper chest of drawers, pure mid-century Hollywood, supports an exquisite 19th-century Chinese water urn. Above hangs a painting of polar bears that Davis is selling on consignment for his client, the actor Matt Dillon. 

That much rock-n-roll in an architect’s soul could be grounds for expulsion from the AIA. 

Davis clearly got off on the wrong foot in his chosen field by having seen a thing or two before he sat through his first lecture in graduate school.  “I grew up in a 19th-century townhouse in Manhattan,” he says. “My mother was English, so I went to Europe when I was very young.  She and her family came from a tradition of beautiful old houses.  My uncle is David Mlinaric [a top British decorator, with clients ranging from Mick Jagger to Lord Rothschild].  When I worked in his studio one summer in high school, I came to appreciate the way he used furniture and decoration to complete architectural space and create ambiance.” 

After Harvard, before going on his own, Davis worked for a number of firms, including Beyer Blinder Belle, specialists in historic preservation. “I received a good, classic foundation at Harvard. But everything I learned about design there, I have been unlearning ever since.  Architecture falls short in its regard for the client.”  Conventional wisdom holds that it’s the duty of the architect to “educate” his clients.  Davis, in contrast, finds the untutored eye inspiring.  “My clients free me up,” he says.  “I get my nerve from them.” 

And that’s some nerve!  A lot of Davis’ new-from-the-ground-up houses look more like renovations.  “I use salvaged materials to give architecture patina and ambiance that you cannot achieve with new materials,” he says.  The furnishings he sells in his store are the same ones he steers clients such as the actor Zack Braff (Scrubs) toward.  Jason Wiens, maker of that fantastic chandelier, also does a range of simple, utilitarian pendant lights with an added kick—shades made from thick glass that looks as if it’s almost still molten. 

Now that 3FortySeven is in the capable hands of the affable manager Giovanni DiMola, Davis is focusing on his plentiful outdoor space.  He already hosts one food truck in his spacious front “yard,” and shortly Tortillaville will be joined there by another, “a young fellow who builds brick ovens has installed one in an old FedEx truck.  He plans to make pizzas.”  Meanwhile, Davis has his eye on a surprisingly green space outside the commodious back room of 3FortySeven.  Maybe a outdoor cafe? A place for live music?  Outdoor movies in summer?  Stay tuned.

3FortySeven
347 Warren Street
Hudson
3FortySeven’s official opening celebration
Saturday, 7 - 10 p.m. The public is welcome.

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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 05/24/11 at 02:41 PM • Permalink

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Style Shopping: Mirror, Mirror

On Saturday, April 23, 441 Gallery, the upstairs exhibition space at TK Home and Garden in Hudson, will host the opening of an exhibition of twenty-eight mostly convex mirrors designed by Cristobal Morales, who lives in Spencertown.  Beautifully crafted and elegant, it takes more than a moment to recognize the humble origins of their frames.  Part of the fun is trying to figure out what each frame is comprised of— the brush from a street-cleaning truck, a rusted circular saw blade—not easy, since most frames combine at least three separate elements.  “With just two,” says Morales, “it looks too much like what it is.  The third transforms it.” 

Cris Morales grew up in circumstances he describes as “beyond modest.  There was little in the way of games and toys at our house.” Nonetheless, he recalls, “My hands were never quiet.  I made things from stuff I found—sticks, bits of metal and cloth.  My brother kept bees, so there was always beeswax around, and at noon, it was very soft so I could sculpt with it.  I loved acting, writing, poetry, the arts.”  Neither his mother, who had her hands full, nor any of his seven siblings shared his interests.  “I always wished that I could find someone to encourage me.”

As a teenager, whenever someone would ask him if he knew how to do something, Morales’ made a policy of saying, “yes,” regardless.  That was how he landed a job with a landscaper.  “I found I was good at landscape design,” he says. “Then I decorated a friend’s house.”  All of their other friends were impressed.  “I was impressed with myself,” he says.

Morales photographed the project, which he now describes as “very Crate & Barrel,” and took the pictures with him on job interviews, hoping they would win him a position as a design assistant, the sort of entry-level job normally filled by recent Parson’s graduates.  He interviewed with Michael Krieger, who, at the time, had a busy New York City design office.  As luck would have it, Krieger turned out to be the mentor Morales had dreamed of as a little boy, the one who would encourage him.  “I worked in Michael’s interior design business for five years,”  he says. 

It quickly came to light that the boy who played with beeswax had a natural affinity for rarefied taste. Several years ago, Morales came upon a coffee-table book filled with photographs of convex mirrors in elaborate, faceted-metal frames, the work of Line Vautrin (1913 - 1997), a French decorative artist who has been hailed as “a poetess in metal.”  He was enthralled.

“One day I found a wheel from an old tiller, and I brought it home,” says Morales, who moved with Krieger to Spencertown full-time several years ago.  “I thought it could be something.  Then Michael gave me a convex mirror, so I put the two together, and I loved it.”  With Krieger cheering him on, Morales began collecting cast-off bits of hardware, shapely commonplaces and industrial oddities, as well as all manner of discs, things in which he alone perceived decorative potential.  His goal: to someday fashion from these bits and pieces assembled mirror frames, reminiscent of Line Vautrin’s.  For three years, as his collection grew, Morales waited for an epiphany that would make the components destiny clear.

Then just five weeks ago, in what Krieger describes as “a breathtaking burst of invention,” Morales began making frames for mirrors.  Instead of “seeing” the finished assemblage in his mind’s eye from the start, Morales learned that “it was a process of discovery.”

CRISTOBAL MORALES: New Reflections With Industrial Artifacts
441 Gallery at TK Home and Garden
441 Warren Street
April 23 -  May 30
Opening reception, April 23, 5 - 8 p.m.
Refreshments include a tasting of cheeses from Couturier of France, one of the oldest goat-cheese producers in Europe, which is in the process of creating a production facility in Livingston, NY

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Posted by Marilyn Bethany on 04/19/11 at 04:16 PM • Permalink

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Kamilla’s Brings Flower Power to Millerton

The brightest and most exuberant spot in Millerton’s retail scene is undoubtedly Kamilla’s floral boutique on Main Street (next door to Terni’s.)  With its chartreusey walls and pots of blooming plants and refrigerator of flowers, it’s cheery and uplifiting even on overcast days. Opened three years ago by Kamilla Najdek, the shop feels like someplace you’d find in a small European city, which makes sense for Najdek grew up in a small Russian city on the Baltic Sea.
 
“I first came to the United States when I was 19 on a work program,” says the 29-year-old. “I wanted to learn English. I worked as a housekeeper at the Interlaken in Lakeville.”  She returned for several summers, mostly because she’d met a local guy, Donald Najdek (who owns EcoBuilders, a sustainable construction company.) “He’s tenth generation Millerton!” she says proudly. “We would meet in the winter in Prague, which is where he proposed.”  After they got married, she went to work for a florist in Millbrook, where she learned everything about running a floral business. “Special events are very important—weddings, birthdays, sympathy, holidays,” she says. “But I wanted to do more than that. I wanted to have a retail shop where you could stop in and pick up something that could brighten your day.” Thus she stocks small items like “air plants” ($15) that live on moisture from the atmosphere and a large assortment of orchids and succulents that require minimal care. “They are very good for weekenders,” says Najdek, who says Millerton’s central location has allowed her to develop a clientele from Connecticut and Massachusetts as well as New York. She also sells a small assortment of paintings,  jewelry, vases and teak furniture.

Kamilla first started working with flowers when she was housekeeping at the Interlaken. “I’d cut flowers from the garden and make arrangements for the hallways,” she recalls. Now, she tries to use locally grown flowers whenever possible, but the only reliable source is Cedar Farm in Columbia County. “Thank God for Marilyn [Cederoth],” she says. Kamilla’s arrangments tend to have a contemporary theatricality, which she attributes to her love of dance. “My mother was a choreographer,” she says. “I get a lot of inspiration by going to performances at Bard College and Jacob’s Pillow.”

One reason why Kamilla is such a conspicuous presence in Millerton is her delivery van: a bright green Honda Element with her logo on the side. “It’s my favorite shade of green,” she says, noting that the vehicle itself has beome a marketing tool. “Now, many people say that when they see any green Element, they think of me!”

Kamilla’s Floral Boutique
36 Main Street,  Millerton; 518.789.3900

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Posted by Dan Shaw on 04/13/11 at 02:07 PM • Permalink

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