Author: Michael Chappell

Chappell & McCullar is pleased to be involved with this exciting event. English antiques and a lot more. We look forward to seeing you!

A special private study program created
and led by DIANE DORRANS SAEKS

Saturday, July 18, 2009
10am—5pm
Jackson Square, San Francisco

A one-day insider’s tour and lecture this popular program (now in its 10th year) provides a rare opportunity for participants to visit private design studios that are otherwise mostly inaccessible to the public. Often we read about the newest work by leading designers and admire their polish and perfection. We frequent galleries and appreciate the finesse of fine art and fine furniture design. Now you can meet real-world designers, view their studios, and learn what goes on behind the scenes.

I am looking forward to welcoming design enthusiasts for this exciting day. I have planned an exciting ‘insider’ day, visiting trend-setting antiques galleries, and meeting visionary dealers who will discuss latest directions in design, textiles, art, books, retail, and antiques. These leading galleries are all in Jackson Square in San Francisco.

We will start the day with refreshments at the gallery of Kathleen Taylor/The Lotus Collection—a favorite of top designers for her rare and antique textiles and her knowledge of the history, lore, and design of beautiful fabrics for interiors.

I am looking forward to welcoming you all to these treasure troves of antiques and art.

My goals for the day are to inspire designers and aspiring designers to see with fresh eyes, and to enable participants to gain knowledge essential to a creative and rewarding design practice.

Please note: All locations are on Jackson Street and on Hotaling Place between Sansome and Montgomery, and on Montomery Street, near Jackson Street. Please park in indicated lots, for the day. This is a walking tour, with very easy strolls from one location to the next.

• Pre-Registration is required. To Register: Call CCA’s Office of Special Programs at 510-594-3710.
• Registrants receive a schedule and map prior to class.
• Space is limited, so please register early to ensure your place in class. Cost: $130, plus $20 registration fee. Lunch is included. Payment: MasterCard or VISA.
• Refund requests must be made in writing and received by July 14. On or after July 14 there are no refunds but you could send a friend or colleague to attend in your place.

‘THE DESIGN AND STYLE SECRETS OF HISTORIC JACKSON SQUARE’
Internationally admired experts in fine antiques, art, rare historic European and ethnic textiles, contemporary design, Japanese sculpture and art, and a world of prized prints introduce us to this often mysterious and hidden world. They offer their insights on design trends, evaluating antiques, and new ways of working with and collecting antique fabrics, antiques, and art.

10am. Kathleen Taylor/The Lotus Collection
Kathleen Taylor has exhibited at the San Francisco Fall Antiques Show for many years, and is a favorite source for top designers such as Suzanne Tucker, Dorit Egli, Grant Gibson, and Paul Wiseman. As the leading source for museum-quality, decorative antique textiles in the United States, she offers the highest quality antique European, Asian, and ethnic textiles including tapestries and other wall hangings, pillows, table covers and general textiles. Taylor is also the United States representative for CB Parsua fine contemporary rugs, and we will learn more about this important collection.
445 Jackson St. Phone 398-8115

10.45am. Chappell & McCullar
This international gallery offers a fine and carefully curated selection of English antiques and Continental European antiques, as well as the contrast of Mid-Century Modern, and Contemporary furniture, along with antique mirrors, lighting, and ceramics. The company also produces its own English country house-inspired furniture.
441 Jackson Street. Phone 693-0882

11.30am. W. Graham Arader
This international print and rare map dealer (a favorite an antiques shows around the country) offers the world’s largest selection of the works of John James Audubon, Pierre-Joseph Redoute, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, as well as historically important maps, natural history engravings and watercolors, lithographs of the American West, Californiana, Hawaiiana and Western Americana.
434 and 432 Jackson St. Phone 986-0750

Lunch. Information to follow.

2.15pm. Foster-Gwin Antiques
Specializing in fine quality sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth-century Continental furniture and tapestries, and contemporary works of art. Foster-Gwin, a founding exhibitor at the San Francisco Fall Antiques Show, offers a collection carefully edited with an eye to outstanding design, originality, proportion, and color. The gallery is housed in its own historic mid-nineteenth century former stables located in Jackson Square, San Francisco’s oldest neighborhood and premier antiques destination. Foster-Gwin is a member of the Art and Antique Dealers League of America and The National Art and Antique Dealers Association.
38 Hotaling Place. Phone 397-4986

3pm. Daniel Stein Antiques
Founded in 1982 and located in the historic Jackson Square district of San Francisco, Daniel Stein Antiques specializes in eighteenth and nineteenth-century English and Continental furniture, accessories and works of art. Stein exhibits annually at the San Francisco Fall Antiques Show and the Los Angeles  Antiques Show.   Daniel Stein Antiques is a member of the Art and Antiques Dealers League of America,  Inc.;  the Confederation Internationale Des Negociants en Oeuvres D‘Art (CINOA);  and the Antique Dealers Association of California (ADAC). Mr. Stein is currently President of ADAC.
458 Jackson Street. Phone 956-5620

3.45pm. Japonesque
More than two decades ago, Koichi Hara opened the first Japonesque gallery, selling exclusive collections of Japanese sculptures, paintings, prints, ceramics, glass, and astonishing works of the imagination in wood and stone. Today, the gallery is an international destination for art lovers and connoisseurs who appreciate the subtle grace and elegance of Mr. Hara’s superb collections. His eye is considered one of the most discerning in the art world.
824 Montgomery. Phone 391-8860

4.30pm. Carrots
Interior design by Will Wick and Gabriella Sarlo. Décor and design review followed by an informal reception. This chic, trend-setting boutique, opened recently by sisters Melissa and Catie Grimm, offers a chic and highly individual collection of men’s and women’s fashions, with labels like Kaufman Franco, Vanessa Bruno, Acne, Proenza Schouler, PHI and Rick Owens Lilies. The sisters, knowledgeable about fashion, books, design, and travel, also offer books, and a superbly edited group of accessories for all seasons. (Carrots…it’s an insider wink-wink that acknowledges the family’s business. Grimmway Farms is the world’s largest grower, producer and shipper of carrots. Yum!)
Refreshments and relaxed wrap-up of the day. (Not sure if I can promise carrot juice.)
824 Montgomery St. Phone 834-9040

I look forward to seeing you!

A colleague in London has just told me the Grosvenor House Fair has been ‘scrapped’- his term- for the indefinite future. A profound disappointment as the fair, pardon the cliché, is the granddaddy of them all, and, in my opinion, the ne plus ultra of fairs featuring English antiques. One of the most pleasurable and looked forward to experiences in my life has been attendance at the Grosvenor House Fair.

However, it is attend that is all I ever did, to see what the big boy dealers in 18th  century furniture were doing. Buy? Well, that’s another matter, and that must have been the absent, and crucial, feature that, at bottom, militated the decision to cancel the fair. The primary reason cited was that the hotel owner could put the Grosvenor House Great Room, the fair’s venue, to more profitable use. Well they might, as it is unlikely the fair participants would be able to pay more in stand rental: it would hardly be surprising to find the fair organizer actually sought a reduction in facility rent from the hotel.

No question, both Olympia and Grosvenor had tough sledding this year, with the general economic malaise contributing to poor attendance and lackluster sales. As well, London Old Masters Week and the non-participation of a number of show stalwarts doubtless further functioned to siphon off would-be show attendees.

Ironically, the Grosvenor House fair got is start in 1934 in order to give the ailing antiques trade a shot in the arm during the Great Depression. It has become a casualty of the present economy along with a number of dealers who survived the 1930’s to meet their demise in the panic of 2008-2009. With the world wide economy at present manifesting what have quickly become known as green shoots, it might be hoped, for the antiques trade, that the scrapping of the Grosvenor House fair constitutes the darkness before the dawn.

What we call a centre table the French refer to as a table de milieu. The prosaic English, or Park Avenue American,  term describing a round or oval table placed in the centre of an entry hall and displaying, say, an outsize floral arrangement, is far less intriguing than the French, intimating as it does the foyer of a Parisian hôtel particulier, with the table a useful surface for, well, a milieu, the gaggle of objects, sometimes linked by a common theme or purpose- or interesting in their accumulation precisely because there is no apparent linkage.

What put me in mind of this was a conversation I had with Diane Dorrans Saeks, whose new blog will explore disparate influences in style and design. That, of course, was the primary focus of our discussion yesterday, with Diane pointing out that the fact of disparate influences is the essential defining element of style. As usual, Diane hits the nail directly atop its obvious head.

With the decline in interest in so-called mid-century modern design, it becomes apparent that what might masquerade as style is more often an adherence to an aggregate of clearly recognizable period motifs. While the Aristotelian phenomenon of mimesis makes the recognizable initially pleasurable, its repetition without variation ultimately yields an aridity that results in the desirable quickly becoming passé. This is hardly a modern phenomenon, with Winkelmann arguing furiously in the middle of the 18th century for the abandonment of the international rococo style, and a return to the aesthetic purity of classical antiquity. Of course, Winkelmann’s well-reasoned, archeologically accurate neoclassicism itself survived in popular culture for only a couple of decades.

Style that is less trapped in time is paradoxically astylar. ‘Eclecticism’ we typically call this collection of motifs culturally and temporally disparate. I would maintain that, by and large, those whose outward expressions of style match their personal experience tend to provide us with the aesthetic equivalent of the table de milieu. Let me develop this notion over my next few blog entries. Diane, your experience is certainly broader than mine and I look forward to your wading in.

A market note this morning, with shares in Bed, Bath and Beyond rising on increased revenue, a function of increased sales following the demise last year of its major competitor, Linens N’ Things. (Did I get the apostrophe in the right place? Please note, brand identifiers- erratic punctuation, though it might look cute on the signboard, does not in itself guarantee revenue.)

With the winnowing out of English antiques dealers over the course of the last couple of years- with Hotspur, Jeremy, Norman Adams, and Dillingham and Company now of blessed memory- one might expect the slack would be taken up by those of us who survive, albeit holding on by a thread. As the poor performance of furniture at the recently completed Olympia and Grosvenor House shows demonstrates, in the present climate, short of giving things away, the retail dealer is still experiencing tough sledding. It might at first face seem a surprise that auction sales have done alright- some have- although no record setting prices this year compared to those realized the middle of last year. The same can be said of contemporary art, and we will see, following the conclusion of Old Master’s Week in London how that segment of the market is fairing. A sidebar, we do from time to time buy at auction for clients, and with some frequency for one particular client. Interestingly, we often see a number of people who will pay through the nose for a piece at auction, usually in the mistaken apprehension that auctions are a wholesale resource. Wrong…

Still, the fact of consolidation within any consumer market segment might in the short-term result in a sales bounce for the surviving retailer, we know from the numbers and locations of our website browsers, we are dealing in a global marketplace. Retail outlets have not for some years now required convenient locations, like gas stations, to encourage customer traffic. With all that, our 18th century English antiques are inherently tactile and, so far as I know, what Bernard Berenson in art critical terms used to describe as ‘tactile values’ still requires physical inspection for validation. With all that, it is rarely that we do not have a first time visitor walk through our front door that has not already perused our website.

We had a word this morning with Ellie Cullman, year in and year out an AD 100 designer and, pleased to say, a good client of ours. With her speciality the use of not just English antiques, but the best quality period pieces of any stripe, our telephone conversation with her this morning put me in mind of one piece she purchased from us several years ago. Although small, it speaks of a presence established less by size than by iconic design.

This George III painted and gilt settee, though slightly less than six feet in length, achieves a presence that far exceeds its mass. With its original paintwork, the gilding picks out features including the Greek fret motif on the arms that distinguish it as the quintessence of neoclassical design.

We were able to pair the settee with a contemporary Colony silk blend fabric, with a sage green colorway that nicely accented the white distemper and gilding of the frame.  Frankly, the effect of the piece when it was delivered to Ellie’s client was almost lyrical, causing the client to literally dance for joy. Someone often in the public eye, we have seen the client in TV interviews, seated on this settee. If that isn’t presence, then what is?