Displaying items by tag: furnishings

The Flagler Museum in Palm Beach, Fla., is lining its domed music room with newly restored seating that had long been shedding bits of gilding and threads from its tapestry upholstery. Meanwhile, the once-prominent original supplier of the furniture, Pottier & Stymus, is re-emerging from obscurity.

The oil and railroad magnate Henry Flagler and his third wife, Mary Lily Flagler, bought roomfuls of Pottier & Stymus furnishings around 1902, as Mr. Flagler’s longtime favorite architecture firm, Carrère & Hastings, was completing construction of the couple’s showplace Beaux-Arts house.

Despite the sometimes irreconcilable differences that culminated in the Civil War (1861-65), Newport and other Northern cities maintained close social, economic, cultural, and artistic ties with the South from the Colonial period through the Gilded Age. The 2015 Newport Symposium, North and South: Crosscurrents in American Material Culture, invites a fresh look at regional differences in American furnishings, silver, textiles, painting, architecture, and interiors to reveal the complex exchange of ideas and enduring influences.

Piece by piece, the furnishings of the last Hawaiian queen, Liliuokalani, are returning to Iolani Palace here, on a grassy square wedged between office buildings and populated by egrets. The royal property was dispersed through auctions and giveaways around 1900, but benefactors are retrieving it from antiques stores, thrift shops, backyards, storage units, museums and government offices worldwide.

During a recent tour of the palace, an Italianate 1880s building that became a museum in 1978, its curator, Heather Diamond, and its docent educator, the historian Zita Cup Choy, described how chairs, tables, dinnerware and cuff links had ended up scattered.

The auction of Rachel “Bunny” Lambert Mellon’s estate, which offered collectibles from a $39.9 million Mark Rothko painting to a rabbit-shaped doorstop for more than $5,000, fetched $218.1 million at Sotheby’s (BID) in New York.

The 1,521 objects including fine art, furnishings and jewelry owned by Mellon, who died in March at the age of 103, were offered in three sales over five days that ended yesterday. Ninety-eight percent of the lots sold.

Collectors sought a piece of the history of the American socialite, who was married to the late banking heir Paul Mellon. Sotheby’s said more than 5,000 visitors came to see the collection in one week at its New York headquarters.

A window on the private world of China’s Ming and Qing emperors opens october 18, when some 200 works — portraits, costumes, and palace furnishings such as bronzes, lacquerware, and jade—drawn from the holdings of the Palace Museum in Beijing go on view at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. The exhibition surveys the seminal role of imperial rituals and religion in the Forbidden City, along with hidden aspects of court life from the mid 14th through early 19th centuries.

Beginning on July 12, Neutra VDL Studio and Residences, the former Los Angeles home of the Austrian-American architect Richard Neutra, will replace all mid-century furnishings with their Cold War-era counterparts from Eastern Europe. The objects, including chairs, tables, lamps, phones, pictures, books, and cooking utensils, will be provided by the nearby Wende Museum, which is devoted to preserving the Cold War artifacts of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Although the two design cultures share aesthetic tendencies, they have often been examined separately. The provocative installation, titled “Competing Utopias,” will present modern design from the East and West in a unifying context.

According to the Neutra House, the installation is meant to raise more questions than it could possibly answer. For example, Why do design objects from the East fit so seamlessly, often invisibly, into a high design mid-century home from the West? The exhibition looks at the Cold War era from a broader perspective than the typical political lens, focusing on the global competition that took place to see who would define what modernity looked like and how it functioned.

Adam Weitsman is a 45-year-old mogul of a $1 billion scrap metal empire with a dozen locations in New York, stretching from the Port of Albany to Rochester and across the Southern Tier.

He flies in a private Gulfstream jet with his wife, Kim, a former fashion model in her early 30s. They drive a $250,000 Rolls-Royce Ghost between a condominium overlooking Central Park in New York City and their other homes. For a change of pace, they climb into a Lamborghini and cruise to a Finger Lakes summer retreat he renovated for $20 million and filled with museum-quality furnishings.

He employs a publicist.

Weitsman, president of Upstate Shredding, based in Owego in Tioga County, lives large while straddling the disparate worlds of his twin passions: hard-charging junk dealer by day, knowledgeable art collector by night.

Now, Weitsman has donated one of the world's largest private collections of 19th-century American decorated stoneware, valued at about $10 million, to the State Museum.

New York’s Brooklyn Museum has finished renovating two rooms from an historic home in Saratoga Springs, New York. The late 19th-century Parlor and Library of the Colonel Robert J. Milligan House have been conserved and refurbished for the first time since they were installed in the museum in 1953. The Brooklyn Museum acquired the rooms as well as their furnishings in 1940. 

The rooms have been repainted and bold carpeting has been added to the Library’s previously bare wood floors. The museum has also restored and installed the Parlor’s original chandelier by Cornelius and Baker of Philadelphia and decorated the rooms with recently acquired objects and several Victorian furnishings original to the rooms but not previously on view in Brooklyn. Each room illustrates a revival style popular in interior decoration in mid-19th century America -- the Parlor exhibits the Louis XV Revival style while the Library depicts the Gothic Revival style. 

The Milligan House was completed in 1856 and is still standing in Saratoga Springs.

On November 2, 2013 Oprah Winfrey will auction the contents of her 23,000-square-foot mansion in Montecito, CA with the help of Beverly Hills-based Kaminski Auctions. Offerings include a marble-topped Louis XVI chest stamped by the maker “Boudin” (estimate: $30,000-$50,000), a set of Louis XV armchairs in hand embroidered yellow silk upholstery (estimate: $20,000-$40,000), and various works of fine art as well as English antiques and furnishings.    

Winfrey purchased the 42-acre estate in 2001 for $50 million and hired well-known designer Rose Tarlow to overhaul the house’s interior. All proceeds from the sale will benefit The Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy Foundation College Fund. A public preview will be held from October 30 through November 1 at the grounds of the Santa Barbara Polo and Racquet Club.  

A Grand Tour: Trade Winds of Influence
16th Annual Charleston Art & Antiques Forum
March 13–17, 2013
Old Courtroom, 23 Chalmers Street, Charleston, S.C.
For information visit www.CharlestonAntiquesForum.org or call 800.926.2520

The forum will bring together an impressive group of speakers from the US and Europe who will demonstrate the influence of the Grand Tours of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries on the architecture, furniture, silver, art, and gardens of Americans and Europeans alike. Dame Rosalind Savill, Director Emeritus of the Wallace Collection, London, England, will deliver the keynote address, focusing on her experience with French decorative arts. The mission of the Charleston Art & Antiques  Forum is to present the best fine and decorative arts scholarship, and to benefit arts education and preservation. Sponsors of the 2013 Forum are Charlton Hall Auctions, PDI, and the Florence Museum.

10th Annual Charleston Antiques Show
March 22–24, 2013; preview March 21
Memminger Auditorium, 56 Beaufain Street, Charleston, S.C.
66th Annual Spring Festival of Houses and Gardens
March 21–April 20, 2013
For information visit www.historiccharleston.org or call 843.723.1623

Inspired by the rich historical, architectural, and cultural heritage of Charleston, the 10th annual Charleston Antiques Show is a premier destination for collectors and enthusiasts who enjoy seeing and learning about incorporating antiques into modern-day décor. Attendees will find English, European, and American period furnishings, decorative arts, and fine art, architectural elements, garden furniture, vintage jewelry, and silver. In addition to attending the show, visitors can sign up for special events such as a luncheon lecture with the award-winning classical architect Gil Schafer, behind-the-scenes tours with experts, and study tours. While in Charleston, enjoy walking tours through the city’s historic district showcasing Charleston’s distinctive architecture, history, and gardens during the 66th Annual Festival of Houses and Gardens and experience the intimate charm and elegance found within private gardens and historic homes.