I find this Todd Merrell Antiques magazine ad weirdly compelling. If you end up at his website (now defunct) it’s like being transported into Middle Earth or the underworld. You might have to retrieve an amulet with the help of a talking dog with eyes as big as saucers or something. Normally, dark, blocky, pseudo-primitive furniture doesn’t appeal to me, but this stuff is so farfetched it’s nearly fictional. I was surprised there were so many pieces and so consistent in their level of fantasy. None of these objects is the slightest bit affordable. Together they point to something really funny about the early 70s—something that perhaps had its roots in the 50s or earlier—that brought together vague tribal fantasies, Middle Ages fantasies, Beowulf, some sort of odd minimalist baroque, the rustic, the pagan and the just plain weird. Maybe what’s appealing about the dark, fantastical solidity of this stuff is that it’s a welcome relief from the relative spindliness and occasional prissiness of all those Danish teak settee legs and arms, or from the over-hygiene of minimalism, I don’t know. These objects must be some sort of rebellion against the disenchantment of a tamed machine-age aesthetic. I think that everyone, especially every midcentury-modern purist and every fussy 60s minimalist, desperately needs one pagan piece of furniture, just to work against whatever it is you’ve got going on, and also, you know, to open an enchanted portal into the underworld. Details and many more pieces on Flickr.
The chair above includes lamp, bookshelf, ottoman, heads of deer to rest your hands upon, as well as dominion over a mountain forest kingdom.
And for your consort, this rocker. (Both wooden chairs above are by Jack Rogers Hopkins, USA, 1970s.)
A bronze wall-mounted chest by Paul Evans, USA, 1969, provides storage for vintage board games, 1970s Playboys, your fur cape, bottles of mead, your sword, whatever.
If I had the Paul Evans credenza above, I’d store the anti-Voldemort amulets (the ones my nephew requires to go to sleep) in it.
Forget Narnia! This wardrobe opens onto candlelit forest groves full of bacchanalian dancing all night long, and no martyr-y lions. Serving Cabinet, Phillip Lloyd Powell, 1960’s, USA
Pair of Room Dividers by Monteverdi Young, 1950’s, USA
Exeunt all, through the doorway to Valhalla.
Where on earth do you find these things? On earth?
(sure — I read the source, but I couldn’t help asking)
I love all of these pieces and I want them in my home! Of course, I can’t afford them and I would probably have to live in a home carved from a living tree, but that could be fun!
Eva: I know what you mean – they seem very improbable. Maybe I found them using magic.
John: I want all of these too! And I live in a bright white-and-blond-wood environment, so that’s saying something. Based on your training, would you be able to say what any of the design schools/references are, for these pieces?
When I first saw them I thought that they were art pieces rather than furniture. Rather like a John Piper ceramic coffee table top if he’d also designed the table, and not just the ceramic part.
Paul Evans, for example comes from a fine art background, while Phillip Lloyd Powell was a self taught furniture designer who was keen on using odd, unusual and found materials, he died last year. It makes me think that these are art, or at least ‘fine craft’ pieces, which is probably reflected in the price. Both men would probably not have had any furniture design schooling and so would not have necessarily had any pre-conceptions as to what furniture design should be.
The Paul Evans ‘credenza’ makes me think of the large number of ceramic murals that were produced by artists, for public buildings throughout the 1950s, 1960s and into the 1970s, many of which have sadly disappeared or are in danger of. But that’s another topic and another issue.
It is a shame that so much from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s are disappearing before our very eyes. There is a belated campaign in the UK to try to preserve some of the public artwork from this period, particularly large scale ceramic work. Future generations will probably castigate us as we have generations before us, for our total disregard for protecting the heritage of the later twentieth century generations that come after us.
No one can save everything, and that is not expected, but public artwork has a role to play in the history of art and design and should be saved for generations as yet unborn.
Well that’s my pontificating done for today!
Wow, it’s a wonderful site. Thank you for the beautiful pics of furniture which are real and rustic. They have perfect finishing and the splendid color gives them a totally different look. The rocking chair by Jack Rogers Hopkins, USA, 1970s is really great and simply the best for me.
What a beautiful period the 70s, I wish I would live in that period, one of the best in the last 100 years so far, in my opinion.