Cappellini | Classically Contemporary

It all started in 1946, Enrico Cappellini opened a small workshop in Carugo, Italy. Since it’s origin, Cappellini has never been boring nor absurd, often with a healthy dose of humor, other times proposing simple, dynamic formal solutions: these are the characteristics that make the Cappellini collection full of vivacious fractures and contradictions. The company has since been taken over by Enrico’s son, Giulio(picture left).

Cappellini continues to seek out new talent with varying temperaments, that don’t create a real “Cappellini’s style” but compete to form a balanced and logical collection.

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Eileen Gray | Slight yet Substantial

Eileen Gray was born on the 9th of August, 1878  to Eveleen Pounden and James Maclaren Gray, a wealthy family of south-eastern Ireland. She was the youngest of five children. Eileen’s father was a painter who encouraged his daughter’s artistic interests. He took his daughter on painting tours of Italy and Switzerland which encouraged her independent and somewhat rebellious spirit.

When 22 years old, her father died. She went to a world’s fair in Paris where Art Nouveau was the main style, Gray was a fan of the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, whose work was on exhibit. Gray would go on to study art in Paris, at the Académie Julian and Académie Colarossi.
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After moving to London, Gray came across a lacquer repair shop in Soho where she asked the shop owner, Mr. D. Charles, to show her the fundamentals of his work. She later returned to Paris and met one of her employer’s former contacts, Seizo Sugawara. He originated from an area of Japan that was known for its decorative lacquer work.

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Sugawara emigrated to Paris to repair the lacquer work exhibited in L’Exposition Universelle. She found after working with Sugawara for four years that she had developed the lacquer disease on her hands, she persisted though it was not until she was thirty-five when she finally exhibited her work.

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Book Review | The Wirtz Private Garden

“This garden is made for my camera” says Marco Valdivia. Unlike the Wirtzes’ commissioned gardens, this former kitchen garden was never conceived as a formal composition: a complete work of art. Rather, it is a working nursery in active use, a laboratory for continuous experimentation, in which plants are moved, transferred to other plots or to gardens in progress elsewhere.

Few landscape designers are more admired than Belgium’s Jacques Wirtz, as seen with the huge success of The Wirtz Gardens, published in the fall of 2004. The Wirtz Gardens surveyed 57 private and public gardens designed by Wirtz, many in collaboration with his two sons, Martin and Peter, in locations spanning the globe. Like the veteran art dealer whose personal collection one imagines to be stupendous, the volume raised the question of what Wirtz’s own garden looked like.


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Shedding a Light on Deflation

A client of Inform came in with an estimate the other day. It was dated November 13th, 1989. The client wanted to know if we would honour the estimate even though it was over 20 years old.

“I do not think we can do that” replied the salesperson.

Yet upon further examination of the estimate, the salesperson replied:

“I can’t honour it, but I can do one better. $200 better”.

The item in question was an Artemide Tizio Classic Black Table Lamp by Richard Sapper. In 1989, the lamp was $655. However in 2010, Inform sells the exact same light for $431. That’s $224 less!

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