Author: Michael Chappell

We are back, the truck has returned and the returning inventory has now been shoehorned into our galleries. The dust has, both literally and figuratively settled. We found the dust actually non-existent at the show venue, Barker Hangar at the Santa Monica Airport, as the weather was cold and damp. Make that very cold and very rainy. Doubtless couture choices were pushed into serious disarray for the gala preview.

More than acting as an erstwhile Mr. Blackwell, I sought less to critique wardrobe choices than assess interest in English antiques and fine art. Given our own selection of gear and that of our show neighbor Trinity House- and our prime position just inside the main entrance to the show- we had, pardon the immodesty, a great opportunity. To say that we were anxious to make an assessment after the economic morass that engulfed all of 2009 is an understatement. Although this has now become a cliché, we were unabashedly on the lookout for green shoots.

And maybe we found them, but not matured yet into the money tree. Or maybe they have. What’s apparent in our own gallery business is that everyone felt some sharp twinge in their pocketbook last year, translating into continued caution this year. You may read this another way as ‘no monumental at-show sales.’

But not to despair, because omitting last year, the Los Angeles Antiques Show, amidst the collectors, is heavily driven by the interior design trade. Purchase decisions have always at the show mostly been filtered through the designer, and the show just concluded will doubtless prove to be the same. We have always found the show a good source for follow-on business and consequently find it best to judge the success of the show with a sufficient time-lapse to allow plenty of designer-client-dealer palaver. Who knows? The money-tree may just have come in to leaf.

The Los Angeles Antiques Show is history, and following a week all day on my feet, my exhaustion prevents me from providing any rational discussion about the show. However, I can mention what always makes an extended stay in Los Angeles comfortable- comfort food from Canter’s on Fairfax.  Keith and I have become over the years delicatessen and dairy restaurant aficionados, and decry the lack of anything really like them in San Francisco. With all that, like so many other ethnic outposts, they become rather thin on the ground as the ethnic communities they serve become integrated. It is reassuring, however, that while a fair number of Canter’s regulars are, shall we say, of mature years, patrons of all stripes keep the place busy.

Keith is a fanatic for bagels and lox, and I suspect that would be his menu for his last meal on earth. My own background on the farm inclines me toward what are known as fancy meats, and ox tongue consequently is a favorite. My tongue sandwich yesterday at Canter’s was exquisite. In this age of celebrity chefs, to describe something as ostensibly lowly as a tongue sandwich as exquisite seems a non sequiter, but nothing else describes it adequately. Tasted delicious, surroundings comfortable- well, if my enjoyment was not an exquisite experience, I don’t know one. Oh, and free parking, too.

We’ve had to cope with plenty in the trade in English antiques over the course of the last year, but the now-abating economic malaise which seemed an inexorable force of nature now pales compared to the plume of volcanic detritus making its way across western Europe. With all that, hope springs eternal that our brave European colleagues, Elliot Lee, Trinity House and a number of others make their way here. Who said the trade isn’t fraught with excitement?

From the natural environment of my last blog now back to the built environment, I have to say this most recent of our two-score return trips to the Royal Hawaiian Hotel was not without some trepidation. I’ll readily grant, the place was formerly more than somewhat dowdy, albeit in excellent repair, and it reminded me of going into my grandmother’s living room. Familiar, comfortable, shabby from long use, with anything inconvenient long-since gotten used to. And, everything within eyesight fraught with sentiment. I daresay, the design team involved with last year’s refit, doubtless aware that my sentiments matched those of many, many others, must have approached this project with a considerable degree of, shall we say, anxiety.

It was, then, with profound relief we discovered the masterful job Honolulu-based interior designers Philpotts & Associates performed. Actually, I should stress the ‘masterful’, because the designer was able to coordinate older, ineffectively wrought design elements- like the linking colonnade- and render them attractive and integral.
Along those lines, common areas of the hotel seldom used, like the Diamond Head portico with its vista on lawn and planting beds of cannas and torch ginger in Royal Hawaiian pink, are now welcoming- and used!
The refit has substantially altered the ground floor layout of the hotel, with a number of later accretions- small office and conference areas and function rooms- removed, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find restoring the ground floor to something closer to its original footprint. Frankly, I was a bit concerned about the fate of the lower lobby, with its vestiges of a long-ago scheme realized by Frances Elkins. But, of course, vestigial is all it formerly was because Elkins’ original design with comfortable seating and conversation areas had given way over the years to the lobby becoming little more than an inordinately wide hallway, with what little furniture the space contained all shoved along one wall. Here, again, the adjacent small Lurline room, a function room that was hardly larger than a closet, was removed allowing from the lower lobby a through vista to the beach.

Effectively updating the venerable always begs the cliché the best of the old and the new. Despite the prominent use of koa wood pieces of traditional motif.  I’d have to say that the design for the Royal Hawaiian Hotel is quite new, by which I mean though it has a quality of mimesis to render it intellectually comfortable it is distinctive and speaks for itself- and not just in the accents of an earlier day. And yet it seems to have always been there, as the design articulates perfectly with the corpus of the hotel, its surrounding gardens, and the beach.

If you’ve traveled to Hawaii at any time during the past 30 years, you’ll know that you’re obliged to complete a declaration form for the State of Hawaii Department of Agriculture, certifying you are not carrying any contraband of the flora or fauna variety. The reverse of the form is a survey from the Department of Tourism for visitors and returning residents, detailing length and purpose of stay. Frankly, I’ve nearly memorized this form, as it is unchanged since I first visited in 1976. I must feature myself an erstwhile kama’aina, as I’m pleased to tick the last box in the field ‘Number of visits to Hawaii’, at more than 20.

Even so, we never get to do as much on our visits as we’d like. Although not sluggards, we do enjoy daily beach time- two or three hours- and the occasional movie, and this eats considerably into what we’ve got at our disposal. With all that, even in the concrete and asphalt maze that represents so much of Waikiki, we still are surprised by what we see and this late trip more so than before. Keith and I both love birds and tropical foliage and, not surprising, one finds both together. For the first time ever, I saw an amakihi amidst the torch ginger in the garden of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. This diminutive honey creeper with the curved beak and breast feathers the color of Dijon mustard was a surprising site. The rarity of the honey creepers is a given, and my presumption always is that something rare should be somewhere remote. Had we been on a nature hike above the Manoa Valley, we would have been no less delighted but a little less surprised to see this tiny bird.

By the same token, we were surprised to see on several occasions elepai’o, perhaps a little less elusive, on walks we had taken through Kapiolani Park. For years, ‘Elepaio’ hadn’t been much for me more than the name of a street I used as a shortcut to Kahala Avenue and back to Waikiki.

Mind you, neither of these bird species are particularly common, and they are both very, very small. The elepai’o is hardly as large as a half-dollar coin. Still and all, that we saw them on this trip, without making any particular effort was, in my view significant. My initial reflection was that, given the fewer numbers of tourists, human activity was both not impeding the birds’ natural range, or limiting their ability to access areas the presence of so many people would ordinarily cause them to avoid. Too, residential and commercial development has ground to a halt and with it habitat destruction.

Moreover, there might be something a bit more broadly systemic at work, too, and I say this with the full realization that the collective consciousness of the human species is possessed of sufficient ego that it has historically removed itself as a component of any natural earthly system. But hope springs eternal, as the poet says, and perhaps those in Hawaii and elsewhere who’ve wisely counseled linking our consciousness with that of the larger natural world are finally achieving some effect. I hope the small birds we were delighted to see represent a physical manifestation of a spiritual move in the right direction.