kirkerblog 4.0

One of my favorite recent-vintage songs is "I Predict A Riot" by the Kaiser Chiefs. Little did I know that I'd be instigating one! There's a small, Greek Orthodox church around the corner from my house (an oddity even by South Austin standards - aside from UT frat boys, we don't have many Greeks here), and I noticed a for-sale sign go up out front last week. Within three days it had a "contract pending" sign attached, and a quick MLS search confirmed my suspicion: it was listed as a "1/3 acre builder opportunity." (Translation: "teardown.") I posted my findings on my neighborhood association listserv and ... well, if not a riot I instigated a significant ruckus, including at least one promise to physically block any bulldozer that might try to tear down the church.

As it turns out, the building originally housed a Catholic church (and monastery!) serving the local Hispanic community that relocated once its congregation outgrew the quarters (which are probably smaller than my house), and it was constructed in the '30s using stones taken directly from Barton Creek. In other words, it practically defines the term "historic structure," and now we're alerting the media and probably petitioning the city council to get it historic-landmark status. (Although the pending buyer is, according to the church's pastor, a preservationist, there are a number of greedy developers in the area who've used "proxy buyers" to acquire properties under the auspices of preserving their heritage, and then proceeded to tear them down without getting a permit. Doing so is, obviously, illegal, but unfortunately the only penalty is a relatively small fine.) Anyway, this has nothing to do with my hotel or store plans, but I thought it was an interesting aside.

Store update: I'm in the final lease-negotiation stages, and the landlord -- to my chagrin -- wants the place open in time for the Christmas shopping season (e.g. Thanksgiving weekend at the latest). I was hoping to hold off the launch until January, but if I have to open in November, I'll do so. (Unfortunately that means the floor might be half-empty, since much of the vintage furniture I'm planning on selling will be coming from a series of auctions transpiring in December, and it's unlikely that that stuff can be transported to Austin before the end of the year. The landlord is aware of this fact but wants us open regardless; that's a longer story I can't get into until after the lease is signed.)

Case in point #1 of the kind of thing I plan to sell: these two very newly acquired Hans Wegner Papa Bear chairs. Wegner is one of the most renowned furniture designers of the 20th century, and the Papa Bear is one of his most famous designs; they invariably command high prices at auction. Finding a vintage one in mint condition is difficult; finding a matching pair in mint condition is nearly impossible. Although I am sorely tempted to keep them for myself, the last thing I need is another red chair -- I have six red Mummy dining chairs en route from Moss, along with a DWR loveseat that was the first thing I bought for my new house -- and the Papa Bears will be a perfect centerpiece for the store's launch ... unless I find something even cooler in the interim, e.g. at the October Rago sale (plane tickets and B&B room in New Hope, PA -- just across the border from Rago's Lambertville, NJ headquarters -- already booked for that one).

Interesting article in today's NY Times about the rising difficulty of financing commercial real estate projects through loans. My decision to put my hotel plans on hold is seeming increasingly sound.

Q&A time, since I've had a few questions about my plans for a store:

Have you picked a name yet?
Nope, still debating. The friends and family I've polled prefer Obras. (The Spanish translation of "objets d'art" is "obras de arte," and since I'll be selling art and decorative arts, the term seems to fit, plus it syncs with the Latin theme the art will have.) The professionals in the interiors field seem to like Kirk better. We'll see.

I'm unclear what you mean by "modern vintage." It's a broad field.
Indeed it is, so allow me to explicate what I won't be selling:

• Reproductions of classic pieces, a la Design Within Reach. I have no desire to compete with them or become an authorized reseller of Knoll, Cassina, etc. That's not to say I might not sell the original versions of reproduction items found at DWR, but it's unlikely you'll ever see, say, Eames lounge chairs in my store. (That said, the early rosewood versions are much nicer, in my opinion, than the current ones, but Jesus, is there any bigger mid-century design cliche than an Eames lounge chair? The Barcelona chair runs a close second.)
  
• Vintage design not yet "ready for prime time," at least here in Austin. I like Danish modern and Heywood-Wakefield, but blond wood had its heyday in the '90s, and it's not yet ready for a revival. '70s, and even some '80s, furniture is starting to come back into vogue in places like NYC and LA, but again: I think it's too soon for that here. (I'm also not a fan of the so-called "Hollywood Regency" look, so that's also not something we'll be pursuing. I would, however, pursue Hollywood-Regency aficionado Jonathan Adler -- "see you later, decorator!" -- if he were single, but that is alas not the case.)
  
• The mass-production stuff your parents or grandparents had in the '50s or '60s. You can find plenty of that on eBay and in a number of Austin mid-century stores if you want it.
  
• The super high-end stuff sold at the "Important Design" auctions held quarterly or semi-annually by Christie's, Sotheby's, Phillips de Pury, Wright and Rago. There is a tiny sphere of people willing to pay $20,000 and up for a George Nakashima table (his priciest stuff has been selling for well into six figures - one of his coffee tables sold at Rago in April for $240,000), $15,000 for a Paul Evans cityscape table, or $29,000 for a Jean Prouve barstool (all examples of real-life recent purchase prices - here's the barstool citation, for instance), and I don't think many (or any) of them live in Austin. (That said, I did recently get a great bargain on a Prouve school desk -- one of his earlier and less outrageously costly items -- and you'll definitely see it in the store come launch.) I'm focusing on lower-priced items from lesser-known (but equally good) designers, as well as "undiscovered" pieces from the majors. (I am at present attempting to verify the provenance of a pair of chairs designed by Marcel Breuer for the UK-based Isokon furniture company in the '30s, emulating the then-new Alvar Aalto bent-plywood style. I've never seen these chairs anywhere else, and my online and print-design encyclopedia research has turned up zilch, so I'm wondering if I stumbled across a rare pair of unproduced prototypes or something ... which, by the way, would put their worth into stratospheric levels.)

I'll post pics of some examples of the kinds of things you will find in a future blog.

Why are you going to Southeast Asia if you're focusing on furniture and Latin art?
To find items for the third piece of the inventory puzzle: handicrafts (or decorative arts or accessories or whatever you wish to call them). I know where to go to source South American items I want to sell, but it's been nearly five years since my last visit to SE Asia. From everything I've read about the region, it sounds like there's plenty of unique, artisan-crafted goods to be had there. And let's be honest: acquisition cost is a big concern of mine, and you can find all sorts of beautiful hand-crafted decorative items there for next to nothing in places like Hanoi and Chiang Mai where the cost of living is low and the artisans make a very good living charging "gringo prices" that still seem incredibly cheap to us actual gringos. (I have no idea what the Thai term for "gringo pricing" would be, hence my bastardization of its Mexican use as an alternative.)

Problem #1: I returned home last night from an overnight trip to Houston to find a message on my home voice mail from the movers I hired to transport my Rago lots. They said they were in town and wanted to make delivery at 8am this morning. This was problematic since a) my week-long delivery window doesn't start for two more days (nor have I ever heard of said windows being "approximate"), and b) I hadn't yet rented a storage unit. (Regarding my aforementioned moral dilemma: the storage facility near my old house isn't yet open, so it wasn't an option.)

Problem #2: I woke up at the crack of dawn to visit the only reasonably priced climate-controlled storage unit I could find in South Austin on such short notice. Jolene, the owner's daughter, assured me that an 18-wheeler would have no problem entering the facility. Um, no: had I paid closer attention to the facility's relatively steep driveway, I would've noticed that there's no way a large truck can enter without bottoming out. Thus, the only feasible option was to rent a smaller U-Haul and use it as a makeshift shuttle vehicle.

Problem #3: We had to find a U-Haul facility where the movers could temporarily park the 18-wheeler. The driver suggested one in Round Rock, which is a good 90-minute drive in lunch-hour traffic. I knew there was one on Ben White, roughly halfway between the storage facility and my house (a five-minute drive), and sped over to check it out; they could indeed fit an 18-wheeler in an adjacent vacant lot. Problem solved relatively quickly.

The movers are currently moving all my stuff onto the U-Haul, at which point I'll meet up with them at the storage facility, and THEN we have to drive back to my house for them to drop off the 6-7 items I'm using here. Let's just say it hasn't been the best morning...

I'm experiencing a moral dilemma at present. I have a large shipment of furniture (the 30-odd items I bought at last month's Rago auction, intended for sale at my future store) arriving in about a week. Since my house dates back to an era when few people owned cars, I am not blessed with the luxury of a garage, so I have zero storage space except for the attic (and it's impossible to get anything larger than two feet long and/or wide up there). I need to rent some storage space, pronto, and I need space that's climate-controlled, as it's not a great idea to stick artworks and antique furniture in an airless metal box that can hit 120 degrees or more during much of the summer. As it so happens, a brand-new, state-of-the-art, climate-controlled storage facility three minutes from my house has its grand opening on Monday.

What's the problem? The storage facility is around the corner (literally) from my old house, the place I lived for six years before moving to NYC, and my neighborhood association spent five years fighting against its development -- and, obviously, failed. It's a three-story, steel-clad eyesore immediately adjacent to a residential neighborhood, and the developer engaged in more than a few shady actions in order to get the land rezoned for light industrial use. Since I'm expecting to be picking up and dropping off new inventory at frequent intervals, I need something close to downtown, and I can rent an apartment for less than what the other nearby climate-controlled storage places charge (seriously - a 300 sq ft unit is $415/month). The shady place might be my only price-conscious option unless I want to rent something way up in North Austin or out by Lake Travis.

I'm tempted to just rent some cheap, class-B office space somewhere in the 'hood and use it for storage, but how secure would that be, and how easy would access for 18-wheeler cargo trucks be?

Okay, screw it: it's been over a month since my last blog entry, so I'll go ahead and reveal the big plan I alluded to a while back, even though everything's not yet finalized there. Having accepted the twin realization that a) it will be at least two years, and more likely three or four, until I am realistically able to open a hotel on my own, and b) my need to do so may be partially or largely negated by the opening of Kimpton's Hotel Van Zandt and the newly announced 21c in 2009-2010, I've concluded that I need another project in the interim. Thus, I'm opening a store.

Well, okay: not just any old store. I'm opening a high-end design emporium focused on contemporary Latin art and limited-edition modern furniture (mostly 20th-century vintage, some new), most likely to be located in Austin's hottest retail district. My brokers and I are presently in the lease-negotiation stage with my potential landlord -- and, given the prime location, it's a situation where I had to beat out a number of contenders for the space -- but assuming we can wrap up the niggly details (parking spaces, TI allowances, brands I'm not allowed to carry for competitive reasons, etc.) in the next couple of weeks and the space can be finished out quickly enough, we'll be opening in time for this year's holiday shopping season (target launch date: November 15).

I'll delve into greater detail once the lease is signed -- and yes, I'm detouring my blog's direction to detail the process of launching this sucker -- but I decided to open the store after having seen how well design-focused shops like Moss and Twentieth have fared in larger cities (though their focus is admittedly more avant-garde than mine will be, and more avant-garde than Austin is probably ready to take), and having been frustrated in my own attempts to find interesting local furniture shops. We have Spazio (gorgeous stuff, but jaw-droppingly expensive) and a Design Within Reach outlet, but that's about it as far as quality, non-generic (e.g. not Pottery Barn) modern furniture goes. Good modern vintage (e.g. Nakashima, Kagan, Baughman, Gio Ponti, Paul Evans)? Zilch. Ditto contemporary Latin art: there's a huge emerging art scene going on in Latin America (a term I'm applying to describe all of South & Central America, as well as Spain) that few Americans, let alone Austinites, know about, and none of it can be bought here, an interesting irony considering UT's Blanton Museum houses the largest collection of Latin art (contemporary and otherwise) in America.

What I don't yet have -- and what I need pretty much immediately, since much of the legal paperwork will require it -- is a name. My interior designer thinks I should simply call it Kirk. I think that's a tad egotistical, even if it worked for Murray Moss, but I'm considering the idea. In any event, I'm open to suggestions, if you have any, and in the interim, I'm planning a number of scouting/buying trips for art and the store's third planned focus of unique handicrafts. First up: Mexico City in two weeks. Later this summer and fall: the emerging design centers of Southeast Asia (definitely Hanoi, Chiang Mai, Hong Kong, Bangkok and Singapore; possibly Kuala Lumpur, Phnom Penh and Bali), Morocco, England and a return trip to Buenos Aires (and, on a less-exotic note, New Jersey and Chicago for this fall's big Wright and Rago auctions).