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September 16, 2008

things we bought on ebay, a prologue

As I’ve documented many times before, Amy and I are coming to the end of our years-long renovation. We live in a two bedroom Craftsman-style house built in 1925. There are two neighborhoods in Dallas with homes built primarily in this period and although they went through a couple decades of decline, have become appreciated neighborhoods in the past ten or fifteen years.

I bought the house in 1998. At the time it was at the edge of the established neighborhood and now is squarely in it. I bought the place at the beginning of a transition in my life toward an appreciation of modern aesthetics in design and architecture. What interests me are the transitions and similarities between the Arts & Crafts movement in America in the 20s and its connection to Japanese minimalism before it and mid-century Modernism after. The patterns and rays that emit from these movements reflect and overlap with dozens of movements across history. It is the commonality between them that has always interested me.

I am drawn to minimalism and modernism because of their simplicity. It’s hard to be simple. You really have to know what you’re doing. While an underlying pattern of aesthetics can be argued for or against, my eye sees a continuous relationship between those who appreciated and articulated beautiful essentialness regardless of culture, time, or place.

We have worked hard to honor the Arts & Crafts heritage of our house and to imbibe it with newness and beauty, to streamline it where possible. I often talk about it by saying, this is the type of house this house always wanted to be. We have removed some of the Victorian ornament still present in Craftsman design and replaced it with things that made sense to us in terms of the pure structure of the house.

To this end, we recently purchased a couple pieces of furniture from ebay. One, a Florence Knoll T Angle coffee table (not the one we bought) that arrived today, and the other, a Florence Knoll 57W sofa (also not the one we purchased) that should be arriving tomorrow.

I’ll focus on the coffee table in the next post.

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