@northwest_mcm_wholesale enters the chat, plus some nice vases and an ode to Studs Terkel
The best furniture buys this week
Welcome to McLotto! I meant for this to be something small for my friends/ random people that sometimes DM me when I post pieces of furniture to my Instagram to look at, but so far I’ve been surprised by the response. Thank you for reading! I’m sending this dispatch from my grandma’s apartment in New Delhi this week. We’re heading to some furniture markets tomorrow so I will hopefully share my finds from there next week.
In the meantime, enjoy this week’s edition which features an interview with furniture dealer “Herman Wakefield” AKA Northwest_MCM_Wholesale. I loved talking with him about furniture trends, misinformation, and what’s after MCM. XO MC
Oftentimes I’ll show my boyfriend a piece of furniture I’m looking at — some wooden chairs, a wonky bar cart, or a folded sofa — and he’ll raise questions about comfort.
This is usually the perfect time to reference George Nelson’s quote in this incredible conversation with Studs Terkel. (If you are looking for the most soothing thing to listen to while you wash dishes or need a break from Call Her Daddy/How Long Gone/ This American Life I highly recommend the Studs Terkel archive!) Fun to read this with Miranda Priestly-esque precision.
This pursuit of comfort that has obsessed us for so long is a very deadly kind of thing. We've erected it into a virtue but it's actually very bad. You see, if you take the idea of comfort it leads you to a very funny conclusion. For instance, you might be sitting in a chair and say 'well this chair isn't very comfortable, I'll go and buy a more comfortable one.' And then you do that and presently instead of sitting up stiffly in say an old wooden chair, you're now falling asleep in a very comfortable chair. And if you then say 'What is more comfortable than a comfortable chair?' you get to a bed with a nice soft mattress where again you fall asleep. And this finally takes you to the notion that maybe the most comfortable thing there is, which is a coffin. - George Nelson
Genius!!! To anyone with a CB2 Boucle cloud chair in their shopping cart right now remove it or face a long, slow death!!! Check out the entire four-part interview series here.
Also, highly recommend this article from NY Times about couches with this amazing lede: “CHAIRS ARE ARCHITECTURE, sofas are bourgeois,” the Swiss French architect Le Corbusier reportedly once said.
As a cool mint palate cleanser before we get into deals, check out this very fun Marzio Cecchi chair I saw on reddit earlier this week. He made a bunch of different variations of these, including this one with an ottoman and a desk version. His mother was haute couture designer Giulia Carla Cecchi, who made some incredible pieces herself. I had a lot of fun looking through his archive, especially some pieces here.
QUICK HITS IN THE NYC/ NJ AREA
A wacky Gerry Lange flex chair for $450 — prices vary a lot online but this is below the average by a lot
A crazy Ligne Roset Peter Maly queen bed for 1,500$. A step above the typical Floyd ones you see everywhere, plus it has a nice dining tray. Kaiyo is selling a similar one right now for over 3K
A nice space-age-y bar cart that I have seen on other vintage sites selling for $350+ is here for $200
It’s my dream to have a USM haller set! You can make it your dream too with these via Craigslist ($2650)
I love this 70s pop-color tiny swivel desk organizer for $120 by Btween Spaces in Brooklyn
This Floyd couch for $800 is kind of a steal (goes for $1700 new). I’m kind of skeptical of Floyd but I’ve spoken to a few people who own this couch and say it’s lasted them a long time
GLOBAL LUXURY LOTTO
A new section with some pieces for those outside of the tri-state area.
I recently bought a different version of this Heron Martinez Mendoza vase and it looks so beautiful in my living room!
A beautiful green vase from Ssense
I have been meaning to buy this very nice doormat from Sunnei for a while and maybe it’s time to bite the bullet
This old Mugler bag has been haunting my eBay searches — they look great and the canvas exterior makes it a fun beater bag
This very spooky mask would be fun to hang up in your room
A great Corita Kent poster for the trad cath in your life
I love any/ all tramp art pieces and this mirror is no exception
An interview with furniture meme king and dealer “Herman Wakefield” AKA @northwest_mcm_wholesale
One of the great furniture meme makers of our time writes under the pseudonym Herman Wakefield. He originally started posting memes about knockoff Eames and Noguchi pieces, but now covers everything from gentrification aesthetics to farmhouse chic and Gen Z home decor.
With a lot of niche meme pages, particularly ones that are astute at calling out trends before they really happen, I often want to ask the person that runs it what kind of stuff they actually like and buy. So I called up Herman from his home in Portland to talk about furniture trends, how the meme page has affected his life, and the recent shift away from MCM furniture. This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.
Why did you start the page?
It started by accident. There used to be these niche vintage dealer [Instagram meme] pages that were really small, but they were funny because the jokes were so specific to people that were into mid-century furniture. And then both pages stopped posting. I always thought I had a good sense of humor and was good at making my friends laugh. But I never tried to make anyone else laugh. So that's why I started the page. You know, to fill the void. I’ve made a lot of great connections and I’ve made a lot of great friends that are in the industry because I was sort of an anonymous nobody that just went to estate sales in Portland for years. It’s the weirdest thing that’s happened to me and I’ve had a pretty weird life.
How’d you get into furniture?
I grew up in Alaska. It was a pretty boring place, in my opinion, and culturally dead. So I got into thrifting because I was into music and trying to find punk rock stuff in thrift stores. Why does anybody get into thrifting? You know, it just seems like, especially years ago, it was like a magical world filled with stuff. It’s like going through a time capsule, although it's less like that now. And then my dad had a bunch of Danish furniture growing up and my mom ended up marrying this guy who was a woodworker who was into Hans Wagner and stuff like that. It's like I grew up with the words and the names.
What do you make of the MCM craze over the past few years, but also just a broader interest in furniture generally?
It's been percolating over the past decade but COVID really changed things. It reminds me of 20 years ago when the Food Network shows stopped being about cooking and they started being about eating. Right around when Anthony Bourdain became famous. America used to be like a huge food wasteland when I was a kid, and now everyone's kind of a foodie.
I think what happened was that during COVID everyone had more free time and they were stuck in their homes, and they realized that their homes are kind of ugly. They don't have a lot of furniture that they want, and then maybe there’s a little disposable income with a certain class of people because they're not going out to bars, dining out, and whatnot. So COVID was sort of like the breaking point where suddenly now everyone's design-pilled.
How did the MCM boom affect your own business?
Every city is different in a huge way so Portland might not be the best example of what things are like in the rest of the country. In Portland, however, it’s impossible to find anything. And then once you find something good, it's nearly impossible to sell it. For what, in my opinion, it's worth. So it's just brought a lot more interest and with people that are newly interested, there’s going to be a lot more misinformation. So there are a lot of new dealers now who may go one or two lines of a Google search deep into something. And there is a ton of misinformation about all this stuff already. A lot of information is almost like pre-internet information, like some guy that owned a vintage store in the 90s decided that some piece was by someone, and then that gets filtered into 1stDibs.
It seems like things are getting really bulbous and space-agey now with more Italian designs and less Danish wooden furniture. Is that something you’ve noticed in dealing furniture/ picking stuff for clients?
I think there's a demand for something after mid-century, especially for people that are into vintage, but there's just no inventory for it. After World War Two you have all these people that are back from the war. There's the baby boom, there are people moving to the suburbs. And all these factories went from making weapons and stuff to making furniture and TVs and things like that so there's a huge inventory of stuff. It was the only time in history probably that well-crafted things were mass-produced.
Then in the 80s people wanted all this lacquer furniture. And most of that furniture is already in the landfill because it ships and breaks so easily. You can't really fix it like you can fix a piece of wooden furniture. And then a lot of fancy Italian sofas and other sort of space-agey stuff was never really aggressively imported or sold in America. There are not a lot of them. So the basic kind of mid-century stuff is sort of what you're stuck with to work with.
Has there ever been a piece of furniture you missed or that’s haunted you? I got outbid on this chair on LiveAuctioneers a few months ago and I can’t stop thinking about it.
You have to have ice in your veins because you'll win some and you’ll lose some. I found a Pantone heart chair years ago on Facebook marketplace for $25. It’s a rare chair and they didn’t have fakes back then. So I messaged the guy and he said someone was already coming to get it but I offered him $400. He thought it was a scam and blocked me. You can scare people with your overenthusiasm.
What’s been a big score for you or something you were really proud of getting?
I found a Raymond Loewy DF-2000 sideboard at an estate sale that was like $300. They’re kind of pieces of shit though once you have one.
I saw in the FAQ section of your Instagram that you won’t show your living room or any part of your house, but I'm wondering if you could share what pieces make up your home. I know dealers move a lot of their own furniture too, but is there anything in particular you’ve held onto?
I used to hold onto things. It's not really like that anymore. I mean, I have these boring orange Eames fiberglass chairs that I got at Goodwill for 99 cents a long time ago. At this point, you know, I've had things and I'm like ‘I'm never selling this’ and then I'm loading into someone's car six months later.
It actually feels good to go through the full spectrum: not knowing what stuff was but kind of liking it then learning more and more about it and getting way into it and hoarding it and then now I'm at this point in my life where I'm not super attached.
What do you think changed?
Maybe just maturity and growing up. Knowing that we don't live in the dark anymore. You can take your phone out in the palm of your hand and you can find anything you want whenever you want. You might not have the money, but you can still find it. In the old days, you basically drove around and didn't know what anything was. You couldn't find it anywhere. And if you found something interesting it would take you forever to even figure out what it was.
If you want a longer cut of my interview with Herman just email me and I’ll send it to you! Thanks so much for reading.
XO
MC
Gr8 interview