Ulrich Franzen's Dana House, New Caanan, 1964 (wow)

These photos are from the Trulia listing I stumbled upon while architecture-hunting in New Canaan, Ct. Built in 1964, it looks like it was furnished around the same time with an impressively vast amount of Aalto, Breuer, and Bertoia, and then really not much new added after that (why mess with perfection?) Highlights of the non-obvious include the VW Van outside, the duck, and the green oven hood, which looks like a sculpture itself.  Also the needlepoint violet pillow and the 18th century portrait- it's nice to see that this isn't staged, but the this is how they lived.

 It was listed for sale at 5.5 million, a price that may be high enough to keep it from being knocked down, as is the sad norm in Connecticut.  But if it does, at least we'll always have these photos.









































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Wary Meyers Candles on Sight Unseen

The brilliant design journal Sight Unseen has a write-up about our candle-making adventures. See it here and apologies in advance for having you read the word "like" so often. :)

Above, Linda's (the genius behind the candles) three-tiered lucite rotating carousel of fragrances, which she mixes, heats, blends and pours into the hot wax.





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Say Aa

Speaking of doctors, some of Alvar Aalto's ingenius furniture and fixture designs from his 1932 Paimio Sanatorium are on the auction block at the always-incredible Bukowskis this week.

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Finnish Bunkbed, with car

Designed by Pirkko Stenroos and manufactured by Muurame.
"The drawers slide out from under the bed on wheels and can quickly be converted into a toybox car equipped even with a steering wheel. It is no surprise that since this form rationally answers the demands of a growing family, it has become one of the most popular furniture forms in Finland."
-from Finnish Design: Facts and Fancy by Donald J. Wilcox (1973)

Unfortunately I don't think Muurame makes the car conversion drawer anymore, but Pirkko Stenroos' designs are alive and well and make us want to redesign our son's room, down to the Invicta-striped, Noddy-esque wardobe.

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J.B. Blunk at Greens, San Francisco

Sculptor J.B. Blunk's amazing redwood masterwork in the cafe area of Greens restaurant in San Francisco, 1979. Although it could be 2011, since thankfully it looks exactly the same today as it did when it was built and opened by the San Francisco Zen Center in the late 70's. Where else can pull up an Aalto stool and have a coffee on a J.B. Blunk? Nowhere!


See also: Checks Please! Milton Glaser's Big Kitchen
From the ever-inspiring book The Interiors Book of Shops & Restaurants, 1981.

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Wary Meyers x Alice Cooper x Alvar Aalto

Aalto knock-off stools carved up with the desktop graffiti from Alice Cooper's 1972 album School's Out.

Basically this started out as an exercise in aging wood to a nice honeyed patina- making the originally brand new, very pale wood stools look like we've had them for years and years- but taken to a whimsical extreme. We sanded them down, nicked them up, cut slices off, carved in the markings, initials, and tattoo, stained them, tinted them, and polyurethaned them. All done by hand with no electric anything.

The stool is featured in our book Wary Meyers' Tossed & Found and now two are available in our shop. So if you're a fan of Alvar Aalto, Alice Cooper, and us, this is the stool for you!

related:
a typography spread from our book


School's Out lp

Alice photo via Mrs. Gorman

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Brian Henderson's Aalto-filled Country House

Back in May I posted the photo of the Alvar Aalto bookshelves in the little closet library, but it's the house as a whole (and the loads of Aalto) that's the really great thing. Especially so in the sun-room photo (top), with the Josef Albers posters, gangly green plants, Aalto furniture, Noguchi lamp, and British colonial/1970's-Habitat campaign furniture.
All from the Queen Anne country house of London-based Architect Brian Henderson (post-rake, above), and via the 1984 book English Style, by Suzanne Slesin (highly recommended).

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aalot of stools

Towers of old Alvar Aalto stools at designdealers.fi

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Aa - Z

From Suzanne Slesin's 1984 book English Style.

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Ingmar Bergman's note-scrawled cabinet

Which is what my laptop is looking like, with the daily scribblings of our new usernames and passwords.

Thanks a lot, hacker.

Aside from that, Bergman's estate was put on the block in 2009 by the Swedish auction house Bukowskis. Going through the catalog you can see what a well-heeled Scandinavian house should be furnished with. Not just the obvious designers- and actually there was no Aalto- but lesser known Nordic furniture makers and craftsmen, most everything in shades of wood and white.

Two favorites:
One of two Bruno Mathsson Pernilla 69 lounge chairs:

and a 1960's glass sculpture by Goran Waarf for Kosta.


Definitely check out the catalog, and the rest of Bukowskis back catalogs. The photos get incredibly huge (for the absentee bidders) so it's an excellent resource for your reference libraries.

Ingmar Bergman's estate at Bukowskis

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Wood Play

From the book "Modern Finnish Sculpture" (1970) by Goran Schildt:

"During the period between 1927 and 1954, especially in the 1930's, Aalto engaged in a series of what might be described as artistic laboratory experiments, making many of the abstract reliefs and free sculptures in which he studied the variations in pliancy of wood fibres."...

" Alvar Aalto himself explains his early experiments in sculpture by referring to Yrjö Hirn. In spite of an age difference of nearly thirty years there was a warm friendship between Hirn, the distinguished and influential Professor of Aesthetics, and Aalto, who was deeply influenced by Hirn's comments on the significance of play in aesthetic creation. It is only by forgetting practical purposes in order to subordinate himself to the inner logic of his material that the artist can raise himself from the established pattern to free creation, inspired by spontaneous joy and delight in play. Aalto's "motiveless" experiments with laminated wood, aimed solely at facing problems of form and of aesthetic effect, in which the wood was bent, split, and fixed in different positions according to its grain, were acclaimed as the first wholly abstract Finnish sculpture."


Above: Alvar Aalto, various wood reliefs/experiments, 1929- 1966
Top: A fountain of Aalto chair legs from Wary Meyers' Tossed & Found. (no presumptions or pretense- our project was only about how to make the white plinth below it...)

related:

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