For every collector, there is the moment when things get serious. Maybe you start out going to yard and garage sales on Saturday mornings for fun, picking up the occasional tchotchke or household item for a great price. Then you start haunting thrift stores, becoming more and more enamored of the “hunt.” Suddenly, you are scouring eBay on a daily basis and spending entire days going from antique mall to antique mall when away for the weekend.
At least, this is how it developed for us. We got bitten by the vintage bug, and hard.
We don’t mind, though. We’ve had some of our best times hunting through dusty upper floors of cavernous antique malls in places as disparate as Arizona, Missouri, Maine and South Carolina. We’ve spent a full day in the antique district of Copenhagen on the prowl for vintage Bjorn Winblad. We’ve braved vintage shops with broken A/C in Palm Springs in the dog days of August and near-zero temperatures at the Paris flea market in the dead of winter (where Kevin was asked to dance with a chanteuse).
In exchange, we’ve collected things of both extreme utility and total whimsy. In the utility category is our original Chemex 8-cup coffee maker, picked up for a song in a Goodwill store in Scottsdale back in 2002, as well as any number of Dieter Rams small kitchen appliances, found wherever and whenever we could find them. Our treasured Rosti bowls serve as the vessels for making our holiday cake and cookie batters, and our Vignelli-designed glass canisters for Hellerhold every manner of flour, sugar, oats, and rice.
On the total whimsy front, we have avidly collected the ceramics of Italian designer Aldo Londi for Bitossi and Brazilian artist Abraham Palatnik’s lucite menagerie. There are 1960’s and 1970’s macrame wallhangingsthat we couldn’t resist yet could never find a place for, and then there are the lamps of Robert Sonneman, elegant in design and as practical a lighting source as you can find.
We invite you to get a glimpse into what the last two decades of collecting have produced during our Vintage Finds: Books, Ephemera & Design show. Who knows? Perhaps you’ll be bitten by the same bug.
