Here is the fab dining room; chairs by McCobb. In particular, I love the soaring bronze sculpture in the corner.

I love this wall-art! It speaks to the aspirations of Modernism; that great trans-national family-of-man!

Here is one of the guest-rooms. I recognize the headboard and nightstands as being part of the Drexel Declaration line. In fact, I have an original brochure below......

Notice the same headboard as in the pic above? I think the Declaration line was a great marriage of two very popular mid-century American styles: Mid-Century Modern and Colonial (as evinced by all the spindles). Great stuff!

Here is the other guest room. I'm told the Japanese painting was brought over in the 1920's. Japanese traditional design and mid-century modern of the Danish variety seem very compatible in that they both emphasize clean lines, organic shapes, and natural materials.

That’s it for our return to Shangri-la; where we can always dream. (and thanks to the owners for opening their fab house to us!)

Some of this booty we snatched up ourselves (I’ll blog about that later in my haul video) but I’m here now to report about the other stuff – pieces that caught my eye but not my wallet. If any of this looks of interest, the public sale is March 6/7!

This 60's dresser was kind of ugly-cute; the wood and color were awful, but the way the 'picture frames' on either side comprised the drawer handles was fab. The rattan-accented mirror would look right at home in any James-Bond-set-in-Majorca movie, and the middle of the dresser sported 3 hidden drawers.

This is the piece-de-resistance; I kept returning to this piece, trying to find a reason to buy it. A mere $150 for this great mid-mod hutch with green felt-lined flatware drawers, inset legs, and space-age hyperboloid drawer handles. It's small enough to fit into a small SF-side apt. too!

This hutch was a little more standard mid-mod fare, but nice and nicely built.

Am I wrong to like this 60's mediterranean blonde-wood dresser/sideboard? (sorry for the blurry picture; I must have fainted)

They allowed me to post these pics of this pristine collection that I thought you would enjoy. I didn’t tour the whole house, but was told it’s all equally beautiful. I love my own house, but it is in the Bay Area where everything seems smaller, so I especially loved that this house had the space to really set off the mid-century pieces. Negative space is such an important part of that aesthetic.

Thanks to the seller and owner. Now I know where I want to go when I die.

We used to have heavy chocolate-colored curtains in our living room, erring on the side of privacy (see for yourself). They were fab, but, in the end, they short-changed us on California’s greatest natural resource; light.

Then, inspiration! we saw these blinds at Home Depot; they are opaque but translucent, an utterly simple and unique feature that amounts to a revolution. This way, even when they are closed, they let in light! It has transformed the room and reminded us why we live in a ranch (and in CA).

When closed they still let in light and ensure privacy and when open they provide the ranch-sized view through the entire window, not just a little slit through the curtains.

They come in solid colors, but we went for this very mod blue and gold pattern; the random staccato rectangles are like Modernist semaphore.

We topped it off by making this pleated gold valance ourselves. It has a slight shimmer that echoes the brass seagull mantlepiece perfectly.

These are the “diffusion glass acrylic” blinds from Bali. We ordered them online from blinds.com. When they arrived, the very bottom slat was split up the middle. I emailed them to perhaps get a replacement slat, but instead the manufacturer sent us an entire duplicate set! Now that’s service!

The only hitch was that I’m in the SF Bay Area and this was a listing from Palm Springs over 500 miles away. Do think that gave me pause? You don’t know me very well then! I had a few days off for the holidays and had always wanted to visit Palm Springs; the sleepy yet infamous resort town where the stylish retired while away the hot days in their Eames rockers. Off I went; road trip to Palm Springs!

The dresser fit into the bedroom much better than the old Mission Highboy; I love the way the low long lines make the room feel so much more……suburban (yes, I’m “taking back” the word suburban in order to make it positive again!) It also came with this nifty mirror….

I love the details on Broyhill’s Brasilia line – check out the hardware from Tomorrowland…

I snapped a few shots from the road trip around town in Palm Springs. This bank even looks like the Oscar Niemeyer architecture in Brasilia that the furniture line is inspired by. Notice the similarity between the lines on the doors in the middle of the dresser and the colonnade below…

And check out the natural stone and the soaring facade covering this row of shops on Palm Canyon Drive….

Lastly, a more subtle, but just as telling detail of Googie architecture, the bold stone and wood leveraged out in a massive cantilevered overhang (same principle at work with the inset legs of the dresser – everything leans out beyond it’s support and appears to float)….

I must say that when I arrived late at night, Palm Springs was lit up like Snow White’s castle; every cool Neutra house and Googie shop had nighttime floodlights. But next morning in the unforgiving desert sunlight, everything seemed a tad more shabby and bleached. I spent the next day hitting the mid mod shops in this oasis dedicated to mid-century, but found it didn’t quite live up to my fantastical dreams (my prize for best mid-mod shopping still goes to Portland’s E. Hawthorne Blvd.) Still – it was a great trip to neverland and the dresser will always serve as a nostalgiac reminder of the future place that once was.

Jadite was heavy, durable, inexpensive and, sometimes it was even free. It was often packaged as a giveaway in food and cleaning products. Restaurants served meals on jadite dishes, as they cost pennies to buy and had a high threshold for breakage.”

– DoIt101

….FREE! This stuff used to be free! Those were the days. But hey; it’s still not too expensive. Check out our latest finds:

This style is called a 'feather bowl'.

This stack in the kitchen.....

....kind of explains the pistachio that we used when we remodeled the kitchen.

Who cares? We were looking for a small bed for our guest room. This bed was simple, clean and modern; priced well, and turns out to have been made by Haywood Wakefield….

Somehow the new bed demanded new curtains for the room. We had plain white sheers, but we knew we could make our own, so we took a trip down to Stone Mt. fabric store in Berkeley and found this great fabric that looks decorative and abstract, but vaguely reminded me of the streamlined machine forms of Moderne (if you stare, you think you see social realist steel eagles and parts of trains)….

The overall effect is quite nice and, between the chance finds of the 30’s bed and Moderne fabric, creates an unintentional but pleasing hint of Deco…

And I just heard that little red riding hood will be coming to visit over the Xmas break (you know who you are!)

For our anniversary, our friends pitched in for a gift certificate to DWR and we got this fab Nelson pendant lamp (thanks guys!) We decided to use this as an excuse to remodel the bedroom (though really any excuse will do.)

One way to remix a room is to create an accent wall. Here's our new wall, featuring the new lamp, Buck the buck, and fancy pancy wall panelling. Barclay surveys from the bed.

Rather than spend a fortune on custom/finished wall panelling, we just got 1/8 inch hardwood-veneered plywood and had it cut to height. This was veneered in red oak that we stained with a copper/sage colored stain; the red and the green mellowed each other out while the green showed up most in the grain with hints of red glowing through the smoother areas. Nailed it up and voila! rustic and retro with a modern twist.

OK, so we went beyond the accent wall and got new wood blinds to which we added some home-made valances. The pattern? 'Robot Man!' Every mid-century lodge-themed bedroom needs green wood panelling and Robot-Man curtains, right? ..... right? (Robot Man says 'right!'; Buck says 'right!'; Barclay says 'damn straight!')

A recent road trip to LA took us to Amsterdam Modern; down a little side street in the valley and well worth the trip. Here are a couple of examples of the great stuff that filled the warehouse.

It was a surreal day; 106 degrees and the hills were burning. A woman stopped us on the street, pointed at the dark cloud that blotted the horizon and said it looked like an atomic bomb, then scurried off looking worried.

No visit to the valley would be complete without a visit to Norm's; googie pancake palace of Van Nuys.

I had never heard of the furniture-maker Broyhill, but when searching for a dining room hutch on craigslist, I saw the one pictured here. I fell into furniture lust; a crazed fever for wood and screws arranged in space age Baroque. However, by the time we responded, a mere 21 hours after the post originated, the piece had sold. So, how is it here today in our dining room?

In my delirium, I sought the piece online and found some background information on the maker, but all instances of the piece itself had vanished from existence; the one that got away; the Loch Ness monster of fabulous mid-century hutches. It had only just been inserted into my consciousness and, like a barbed arrow, it could not be removed.

The background turned out to be interesting. This hutch was part of Broyhill's Brasilia furniture line, so named after the then-newly-constructed capital of Brazil. Brasilia was built between 1958 and 1962 as an artificial and perfect city; a monument to high Modernism's heroic ideals. The 'capital of the year 2000!' Pictured here is the Palacio de Alvorada; Brazil's White House and the architectural inspiration for Broyhill's Brasilia line. Note the similar lines?

Having given up on the mysterious and wonderful Brasilia hutch, we went to a local antique fair, and what to our wondering eyes should appear? Yes! Do a google search on 'Broyhill Brasilia hutch' to find how rare even to find pictures of this Western Ivory-Billed Woodpecker and you can appreciate how uncanny it was for me to find two of them in as many weeks, one that got away, and one that came home.