Just to toot our own horn a little bit…look at this lovely note Matthew from Wisconsin sent us. Hats off to Melissa and Joe, our outstanding Design Associates.

O.K. – So I was SORT OF paying attention to the YSL auction and how it defied current economic conditions in the auction world, and wishing I’d dished out for a coveted catalog early. But it wasn’t until today, when I was getting a super-duper pedicure with my friend Heather that I picked up a People (as I’ve said before, I am only allowed to buy People and US Weekly at the airport for a plane trip), and saw that an Eileen Gray chair at said auction pulled in $28 MILLION! Really? I totally respect and admire Eileen Gray furniture (though not this hideous chair), but, O.K. WHAT? REALLY? FOR REALS?

Can anyone tell me why you’d buy this chair instead of an island? I’m talking, a large island? Please, let me know!

From what I understood from People, all of the proceeds from the record-breaking (close to $500 million) YSL auction went to AIDS research, so that rules, and I’m very glad it did so well. I’m just not sure why you would not just give $28 Mil to AIDS research directly instead of buying a chair that looks like a  character from the alien bar scene in Star Wars.

photo courtesy of WSJ online.

I swiped this screen shot from somewhere awhile back and stupidly thought I’d remember where I found it. Of course I did not – if this is from your site please let me know so that I can credit and link over to you. I think it’s a vintage Eames photo and I thought I might have swiped it from flickr member (and grandson of Charles and Ray) eamesd. This then led me over to his flickr page where I was sucked in for over an hour but never found the shot. The point is, I just love the way this photo is styled. While the photo is about a modern chair, it’s sitting in a room with a, dare I say, Shabby Chic kind of floor, surrounded by an asterisk of interesting objects that form straight lines radiating out from the chair. It’s a perfect combination of old and new, and shows how neutrals can accentuate a rich variety of textures. If the photo is vintage, that typewriter is probably high tech, but it still works in the shot today.

I cannot seem to get it together today. Thank you to M. Campbell who just wrote in on the STACKED! post to let me know about a cool slideshow in today’s NYTimes. It’s about urban planning in Stockholm, where proposals to replace a traffic clusterf, well, let’s leave it at cluster, have been submitted by five architects. They seemed confused by the Sir Norman Foster one, perhaps he let Brad Pitt do something besides play an architect and gave him the reins, or a drafting pencil on this one, I’m not sure.

Here’s a stacked proposal:

image from Gert Wingardh Architects via The New York Times

The Lieb House, by Venturi Scott Brown, was on the move yesterday to its new home on Long Island. This begs the question: While it is floating on the water, is it a duck or a shed?

photos from vsba.com and storefrontnews.org respectively.