BREAKING FREE OF LOFT FURNITURE STEREOTYPES

If this isn't love...
then winter is summer
If this isn't love...
my heart needs a plumber
-- Finian's Rainbow

I've had an email subscription to Daily Candy for years now, and I have to admit I mostly just trash them. When I do peak it's a size zero fashion store or some ten-million dollar face cream. Why don't I just unsubscribe? Maybe it's because I held out hope that I'd have an email like the one I received today. I know the email probably went out to a hundred thousand Angelinos, yet I feel like I have made the most amazing discovery.

For years I've been lusting over Mies van der Rohe, Eileen Gray, Le Corbusier, Charles Eames, George Nelson, and Marcel Breuer and have often wondered who would join their company; and the answer is: Tanya Aguíñiga. From her shadow chair, to her modular lounge, to her low rider stools to her embrace chaise... she's made the modern furniture home run.


My loft-ment offers some daunting furnishing challenges. The white walls are painted with geometric shapes in primary colors (red and blue) and non-colors (black). The shapes form interesting optical illusions, forming a single object when viewed from the proper vantage point. Fabulous as they are, what is a girl to do to furnish, without clashing, a place that is essentially pre-designed?

Lucky for me, I love the pre-existing design (it's in the structure, the interior architecture, the colors). It's tempting to reside in an empty space (with maybe a single tall white floor light) and a simple white bed sans frame. In point of fact that is all it requires, but not all I require.

This is why "discovering" Aguíñiga made my heart skip a beat. In particular, the QB table seems MADE for my abode. I wonder if there was a secret collaboration (Giovannini (the lofty designer of the place I call home) and Aguíñiga)???? In any case, I feel an affinity a la great-minds-think alike.

MODERN LOVE?

Years ago, my father introduced me to Modern Art. As a little girl, I remember the impression seeing Mondrian at the Art Institute of Chicago made on me. I also remember being bored to tears when he dragged me around exhibitions of modern furniture. I may have, if I had any reaction at all, wondered why anyone would care who designed what chair. I didn’t get it.

But suddenly the idea found purchase, when at forty years of age, I found myself sitting in front of a furniture store looking at what I somehow knew was known as the Barcelona chair—in red leather no less!

That chair simply had to come home with me and then little memories from the past emerged and I began to read about the designers and to discover that so much of what I had seen in stores and homes had been, in fact, classics of the modern variety. The mind twisting part was that I found that so much of the distinctive furniture in the trendy high end stores today were designed back in 1925.

TANGENT: This led me to wonder about the word modern. I have to admit—to not do so would be dishonest—that my perspective on the subject had been formed when reading Tom Wolfe’s fabulous send up of the art world in 1975. At the time, the New York Times called Tom Wolfe’s book "The Painted Word" his “…most successful piece of social journalism to date". What fascinated me in the book—which I fixated on from that point forth—was that the word modern, wasn’t modern! I really enjoyed his discussion of the post-modern, etc. and the art worlds struggle to find the right word to describe what was actually current. How could modern be old-fashioned? We are certainly in a fix.

As usual, I am taking forever to get to my point, which is this: my house was finally shaping up, clean and flowing, punctuated by the “metro” coffee table and “Barcelona" chair. One evening I walked out into my living room and was startled by the starkness. It gave me a cold frightening feeling. Instead of the peace of openness and the calm of nature, I had a feeling like cold steel, like hospital. Now what in the world does temperature have to do with feelings? All I know is that it was opposite of that cozy warmth you get when you come into a friends tiny living room and plop onto the tweed sofa. This is NOT what I was aiming for. I wanted beauty; I wanted something free of clutter, a perfect simplicity. But what did I have? I was scared to be in my own living room. Hmmmm.