New Book Gives Rattan Furniture its Glorious Due

A contemporary London sitting room with chairs by the 20th century decorator Renzo Mongiardino, often credited with popularizing rattan furniture for indoor use

I love vintage rattan furniture so much that I once toyed with the idea of opening a store in lower Manhattan, back when stores were a good idea, and calling it Bamboozled. That would have been a misnomer, since bamboo is a different plant, rigid and dense, that grows in divided sections, whereas rattan — from the Malay word rotan and native to Malasia and the Phillippines — is a plant fiber that is hollow and bendable and lends itself much more easily to furniture construction. Rattan is not entirely synonymous with wicker either, wicker being a broader term for craft of woven furniture, often but not always made of fibers from the pliable rattan plant.

Bamboozled was still a great name for a store. File that one away in great ideas that never came to pass. But I was serious about the concept. Round about 1976, my wasband and I drove to Florida and spent a couple of weeks going up and down the secondhand furniture stores and thrift shops of Dixie Highway, which was a rich trove of rattan furniture. Rattan was always a popular choice for subtropical locales, from the days of the British raj in India to the open verandahs of the Caribbean.

Much of what we were drawn to in Florida was Art Deco-style, like the then-unrenovated hotels along Miami’s South Beach, where we also spent time among elderly folk in aluminum folding chairs who didn’t seem to notice the peach-colored mirrors etched with flamingos in the lobbies of the hotels in which they lived (and which are now, of course, boutique hotels thankfully saved from destruction and populated by a whole different group of people).

We filled up a U-Haul and drove back to New York, where we may have gone straight to a store on Hudson Street called Secondhand Rose. The proprietor, Suzanne Lipschitz, took one look at the contents of our trailer and bought most of our haul for what we thought was a very good price (laughable now, of course). We had enough to furnish our Tribeca loft with rattan sectional pieces, including a “pretzel” sofa and chair, which might well have been by the designer Paul Frankl (or might not).

At any rate, with this history, I was very pleased to recently get a review copy of the first comprehensive book about vintage rattan furniture in decades, below.

Rattan: A World of Elegance and Charm, just published by Rizzoli, was written by Lulu Lytle, a woman after my own heart, who took her fascination with rattan furniture all the way to the top of the British furniture industry, founding a company called Soane Britain that manufactures rattan using traditional hand techniques. Lytle even purchased the last remaining rattan workshop in Leicestershire, England and employs 15 people there, some of them older people engaged in passing down the craft through an apprenticeship program.

The book, as I wrote in my review for Introspective, the online magazine of 1stDibs.com, is a triumph of photo research, showing the evolution of rattan’s use from Victorian times through the modernist era and into the glamorous 1960s and ’70s, when it caught on with decorators and movie stars from Hollywood to Milan. Lots more great photos in the review and, of course, in the book itself.

This is one coffee table book that will remain on my coffee table for a long time.

Rattan often made appearances in Impressionist paintings

Girls in a ‘Robin Hood’ chair made by Dryad, a rattan workshop founded in 1907 in Leicester, England

The British Royal fam on the grounds of Windsor Castle, 1946

The Paris winter garden of Madeleine Castaing, one of the 20th century’s renowned decorators

The versatile material is still very much in use today, even by IKEA

American interior designer Celerie Kemble made prodigious use of rattan for a resort in the Dominican Republic

Philly’s Mid-Century Modern Mecca

IT’S LIKE eBAY NEVER HAPPENED at the vast Mid-Century Furniture Warehouse in Philadelphia, where larger-than-life opera props jostle with well-made 1960s American case goods by such companies as Lane and Drexel, and new, retro-style upholstered furniture and dining sets made in China and Vietnam.

Twelve thousand square feet and the place is still layered to the rafters. In a back room, countless chrome lamps and wood pieces await rewiring and refinishing.

Owner Brian Lawlor, who has been in the vintage furniture business for a long time and in the moving and storage business before that, is not fazed by the possibility of having to move further north as runaway development approaches his present location on N. 2nd St. and Cecil B. Moore in Olde Kensington. (That’s Brian, below, displaying his “Best Scavenger” trophy from Philadelphia magazine.)

He has been in this enormous garage for seven years, and has done the auction route as well, but now prefers to sell from his website, by appointment and to the public — for a mere three hours every other Sunday (the next sale is November 18 from 12-3).

Customers line up before noon on alternate Sundays to get a sheet of “Sold” stickers. When the doors open, they dash around and place them on the pieces they want to purchase.

To this jaded New Yorker, Philadelphia’s vintage-modern scene feels practically undiscovered, refreshingly un-picked-through.

Have a look at the Mid-Century Furniture Warehouse website, the FAQs and the handy “Insiders Guide” to nearby restaurants and points of interest, for those who want to make a day of it. ##

 

Latest on Hamptons Reno: My Go-To Great Room

IT ONLY TOOK FIVE YEARS to get there, but the great room at my place on the East End of Long Island is finally livable. The final phase of its transformation this spring: a bout of quickie decorating in the newly insulated and painted space.

This changes everything. The new, improved great room is warm when it’s raw elsewhere in the house, bright and inviting where it used to be dark and dreary. It’s now everyone’s go-to room, instead of what once felt like wasted space.

I worked like a demon for two weeks, putting things back to rights after a fall of construction and winter of abandonment, restoring the room’s furnishings and hanging art (i.e. framed posters). Local yard sales yielded a few things that weren’t strictly needed, but which I could not resist (pix below).

The new wood stove insert, which fit neatly into the existing fireplace, is what enables me to be here several weeks earlier than in the past. Prior to these recent improvements, the house was basically an unheated summer bungalow. Two-thirds of it is still an unheated summer bungalow, but the 400-square-foot great room, at least, now approximates the comfort of a real house.

Painted white floor to ceiling, it looks more like a Hamptons beach house than a cabin in the Adirondacks. I sent new photos to a couple of local real estate agents and asked them to list the house for rent from July 1 through Labor Day. Next thing I knew, the house was taken for the season by the first person who looked at it.

That was gratifying, and freed up space in my brain that had been taken up with worry about finding a summer tenant.

Fabulous Mother’s Day present from my son: a new black Corian countertop for the kitchen, above. Major upgrade on previous chipped white Formica.

A new addition to my coral collection. Can’t buy real coral anymore, so I’ve been buying vintage coral at yard sales, along with flowerpots, rugs, wire items, mobiles…

Art-directed yard sales are not rare in East Hampton.

How cute is this? Yes, another yard sale find.

The Great Room Becomes a Greater Room

IT’S GETTING ON FOR SPRING, and I’ve got a decorating project to look forward to. Naturally, this makes me very happy. It’s been a while since I had an opportunity to indulge this passion of mine, since I’m a designer with no clients — only myself.

The room in need of decorating is the 400-square-foot great room at my rustic-modern retreat on the East End of Long Island. You remember my great room, don’t you? Here’s what it looked like last summer, when the interior walls were the same plank of wood as the exterior walls, and the room was (to my mind — some people liked it) dark and oppressive:

Last fall, over a period of about six weeks, I had the ceiling and walls of this room insulated, Sheetrocked and painted, and a wood stove installed, making it the only winterized space in what is essentially still an unheated summer bungalow.

The floor is still one sheet of plywood over a crawl space, and the new wood stove insert, which fit right into the opening in the existing mantelpiece — though I expect it to work well once I get the hang of it — hasn’t yet been properly fired up.

But my hope is to now be able to use the house a month longer on either side of my usual May-October season — from mid-April, when the water gets turned on, through November, when it’s turned off.  I’ll have at least one toasty room in which to hole up during those still-chilly shoulder-season months.

Basically, I’ll be moving the same furniture that was in there before back in. But I’ll have fun playing around a little with rugs and art and lamps and such.

What I’m happiest about, even more so than the already-warmer, already quieter space that’s been created, is that it’s classic, sparkling beach-house white instead of its former dreary brown. And I’m pleased that I was finally able to get at least this much done, after owning the house nearly five years.

Scroll down for the transformation. Stay tuned for the furnishing.

First the walls and ceiling had to be framed out with 2x4s at 16-inch intervals to hold the batts of insulation in place.

I used Roxul brand mineral wool insulation, supposed to be non-toxic and much more environmentally friendly than the pink fiberglass stuff (so don’t ask me why the workmen are wearing hazmat suits).

Next the Sheetrock went up between the ceiling beams, which were deep enough that I didn’t mind losing a few inches of them to the insulation.

The Hearthstone wood stove insert was delivered and installed in early November. It’s a self-contained unit, lined with soapstone, and with an integrated chimney liner (so I didn’t have to worry about re-building the chimney, which was cracked and not tall enough and didn’t have a good draft).

Over the fireplace and on one long section of the wall opposite, there was cedar paneling I liked. I left it for a bit of texture (enough with the Sheetrock) and had it painted white.

I might have left the ceiling beams unpainted, were it not for heavy stains from long-ago water damage. The easiest thing was to paint them white, too.

The plywood floor got a coat of gray floor paint as a temporary measure. Step by step and bit by bit…

P.S. The house is once again available for rent for the months of July and August (one month minimum). Read all about it, with more photos, here. 

Hamptons Weekend Cottage Keeps it Simple

A FRIEND OF MINE has had a tendency to move often, both her family’s primary residence and weekend/vacation homes. Fortunately, she also has a talent for making any apartment or home look Domino-ready in very short order.

This two-bedroom 1930s cottage in a community of older homes near the village of Southampton, Long Island, is a long-range proposition, but it still looks essentially the same as it did one late summer evening two years ago. That’s when I saw it for the first time and took these photos, shortly after my friend and her husband moved in. (I’m finally getting around to sharing them as part of an effort to resume more frequent blog-posting),

The cottage proves a few things: that (well, as recently as two years ago, anyway) you can still find a substantially built house on a nice chunk of property — in this case, a flat, sunny acre — with vintage details, wood floors and walls — for under half a mil. And that you don’t need to over-furnish or overspend to create an interior that’s chic and functional. Sometimes simple is best.

My friends did a tad of work in the bathroom, installing a new wall-hung stainless steel sink, and virtually none in the rest of the house, even leaving the kitchen just as it was, with its basic appliances and linoleum floor.

They wired up some home-made lighting, and recycled furnishings they’d had in storage. The main seating is two twin mattresses on platforms, arranged in an L in a former sun porch. The dining table converts to a desk, or perhaps it’s a desk that converts to a dining table.

It’s all charmingly improvised and very much to my taste. There’s a renovation in the cards that will add a bathroom, a large bedroom, a screened-in porch and outdoor living areas. Meanwhile, the unassuming cottage fits the bill.