“It started with a chair”.
I remember the day when my mother told me I should never marry a man from St. Louis. There was an undercurrent of look how it turned out for me in her warnings. She had phenomenal taste. Except perhaps in men. She had the chopped up wedding albums to prove it. But what was it about her warning that drew me even closer to Midwesterners? What was it about my upbringing—split between Los Angeles and St. Louis—that made me crave something that felt like home?
A few months ago, I woke up after a date thinking about mismatched chairs. You see, I was imagining us—me and this man—as four-legged objects in my mind’s fictitious dollhouse. Did we clash? Could we sit in the same room together or were our lives too misaligned? And really, how similar does someone need to be to work in your life?
I tried to articulate this question of what I was looking for over the summer at a writer’s residency in Mallorca. Someone asked me if I was single, what my type was, what I wanted. I stammered, unsure. We should find you a Spanish lover. I shook my head, I was there to write a book about death, not fall in love.
A man in a collared shirt, I said jokingly to my co-residents, I can’t help it, I’m from the Midwest. So your type is boring rich men, a fellow-resident said to me in a thick Spanish accent, might I say there’s nothing wrong with that. We were laying around a pool. I was writing. They were topless. It was essentially a commune, not exactly the environment I’d find the kind of man I was pining after.
It seems that, at a somewhat regular cadence, someone will ask, what are you searching for in a person? Sigh. I just have a thing for button ups, I said to my friend
before the holiday. She was just about to launch a matchmaking app, she knew the type. Sadly, they are my kryptonite.This affection for cornfed, preppy-skewing men is something my New York friends have often joked about, Lily, this makes literally no sense, I’ve heard on many occasions. But I’ve been steadfast in the search for my very own put-together man.
As a teenager, around the time when I first started dating, my favorite movie was the 2007 Elliot Page & Michael Cera hit Juno. I’m almost positive I saw it in the theater with my mother. I’d later proceed to freak out the nuns at my all girls Catholic high school when I dressed up for Halloween as a pregnant teen carrying around SunnyD and orange tic-tacs. By first period, they had asked me to take the balloon out from under my graphic tee. Despite my disciplinary scuffle, I maintain the film is a comedic masterpiece. The movie’s opening line, “It started with a chair,” is permanently etched into my brain.
And for me, this sentiment at its very basic linguistic meaning rings true. Many of the spaces I’ve designed for myself in New York, have in fact started with a chair. Three very specific tomato-red, Bertoia-designed wire chairs. They were staples from my childhood that my mother plucked from a free pile in San Francisco when the company she worked for went through a redesign. They, the chairs, have lived in more cities than I have. The bases slowly eroded from years spent in a Southern California backyard. I will never fix them, the patina is simply too precious. Emblematic of simpler times.
When it was time for me to move to New York, they came with me—leaving the comfort of a spacious carpeted basement in the midwest for tighter interiors in Brooklyn. You have too many chairs, a male roommate often said to me. We don’t need any more places to sit. This was half true. The three red chairs sat around a rectangular table tucked under the window. There was a loveseat, stacked stools, a beautiful wooden shaker chair, and lastly a sort of decadent French chair painted in white that was missing its back. The chair per square foot ratio was nonsensical.
In my next apartment—one of those wild lucky ones you hear about but never live in—I had a 16x16” dining room with textured walls and Moroccan style doors that led into our equally large living space. I had parted ways with the roommate who thought I had too many chairs. Instead, I opted to fill the space with a 10 foot long dining table. This time, I actually needed more chairs.
I then embarked on a tireless hunt to find at least three more chairs to build out my collection. I thought, maybe each chair should be different, like Cara Delevigne’s whimsical dining room in London, or utilitarian, like Sally Breer’s Judd-esque chairs paired with folding accordion stools. I marched around North Brooklyn looking at countless sets of chairs but nothing quite matched with what I already had in place. I found my same wire chairs in silver and white, but that also felt forced—something about them being too similar. Another almost.
I was nearing the end of my patience when my best friend suggested we try this new vintage shop that opened in a Greenpoint loft. They were starting to amass a following on Instagram for their bright posters and mid-century furniture. Stacked in a corner, just taken off the back of a truck, and not yet posted online were four tomato orange lacquered Italian chairs with seats in canning. Holy shit. I have the mouth of a sailor, especially when I am furniture shopping. Four chairs for over a grand. Not bad but not in budget. We left. They were perfect. I paced around Greenpoint imagining these chairs in my life while we got a slice of pizza at Paulie Gees. We ran into a boy we knew, hungover and mumbling about how his salary was too high for the check the government sent out for Covid support which had hit everyone’s accounts that day. We doubled back to the vintage shop—forever they would be known as my stimulus check chairs. Indulgent and in the exact shade as my mother’s.
She (my mother) had once again from six feet under (or wherever the hell she was) impacted my decisions. We had similar tastes, deep nostalgia towards objects, and the unfortunate reality of loving those around in very big ways. Her lovers and crushes were that of epic proportions, wandering poems dedicated to a cast of characters, journals chronicling her every infatuation, heartbreak. Lots of heartbreak. Yet, unlike her, who after a failed marriage floated in and out of love, I crave a love that feels like all four legs of a chair are solidly on the ground.
Ironically, my mother’s warning didn’t stop me from dating 3 men born in the great state of Missouri in my first 25 years of life. Or from being secretly elated when a man asked what cities I had saved in my weather app and we both had St. Louis. I knew I’d be going on a date with him. I would put him in my phone as Hometown Hero, a joke we had made in our early back and forth on Hinge.
When I sat down with this man, undoubtedly in a collared shirt, I couldn’t help but feel repelled (and bored out of my f*ing mind) by the unending sermon about the St. Louis sports franchises. Sure, it was nice to be able to reference the same BBQ joint or neighborhood bar. But immediately I could tell, he wasn’t the chair for me. Maybe, my qualifications were all wrong. Maybe this part of myself, the midwestern half, wasn’t as real as I thought it was? Or as real as I wanted it to be. I’d drive myself crazy getting the ratios right.
After a sour date weeks later, I called a friend and panicked. I think it's me, I was frantic and a little drunk. What was wrong with this one? she said. He didn’t know what Cervo’s was. I sounded like an asshole. Maybe I was? But maybe, as I tried to ration with my friend, SOME common cultural touch points were important to me (much like the boys from St. Louis, who had a favorite flavor at the ice cream shop up the road from my grandmother’s house).
Another friend chimed in when I saw her the next day (unsurprisingly, I do a lot of things by committee). Lily, no one goes out quite like you do, I think it's a qualifier you need to be more flexible on. She was usually my voice of reason and had recently abdicated some “must-haves” for a big love of her own. She was right, chairs didn’t need to match to live in the same room. And even if he hadn’t had such glaring culinary blind spots, this muscular construction man turned marxist literary editor and I had literally no chemistry.
I was brought back to a conversation I had this fall with my friend Jared Blake, the co-founder and owner of design collective Lichen. He noted that single chairs are harder to sell than pairs (a singles-tax present in vintage stores and group hangs alike). But sometimes, all you could fit was one. I looked around my own apartment—the three wire chairs, the four lacquer with canning, two chrome kitchen stools then a singular low Eames chair and one slatted dark wood chair that sort of looks like a man. The last two were statement chairs—making statements about what I wasn’t sure. They were standalone, yet somehow worked in tandem.
I was catching up with my cousin, also a writer, on a plane ride to the midwest. Are you dating? Maybe. I was? I was. Was I? Well what are you writing about? He could tell his first question made me a little flustered. Chairs, things that match, people that match, types, sitting on people. I laughed. My cousin cut in, Have you ever read Plato? He has this idea about chairs. I think it's Plato. I hadn’t.
Plato had a theory about platonic forms—ideal version of things. Why he’s even relevant for us, for me, is that this idea centered around a chair. Someone on the internet dumbed down the original text saying, All chairs in the everyday (sensible) world are imperfect instances of the perfect Form of a Chair which exists in the (intelligible) world of Forms. In other words, the thing in front of us, at the very least, is just another thing to sit on. Rarely as perfect as the picture in our brain…
PS. IF you are single and in NYC, use code LAOR on Dini’s app Sitch.
home goods.
If you are looking for a good chair:
You’ve certainly seen some of these beauties before, but here are chairs that live rent-free in my head.
I continue to obsess over animal print. I love these reimagined Josef Hoffmann chairs in tiger.
The molded leather of these vintage Cassina chairs really moves me, the modern art museum in Tokyo had hundreds.
A paper clip stool can do no wrong.
Wood meets woven seating and chrome in this Dimore chair I saw at Salone last year.
Old ikea rules. These pine folding chairs I saw in Mallorca and found them across a couple resale sites. Here, here and here.
It wouldn’t be a chair round up without the lacquer and canning chairs—I always thing I want more so have a google alert set for “1970s Italian Cane Dining Chairs”, should you be in the market as well.
Bertoia will always have my heart. You can find these new at DWR or in multitudes on sites like Chairish.
sloppy secondhand:
Each issue I’ll pick a favorite vintage spot & a local watering hole—maybe you’ll find a new-to-you sofa or a new-to-you man. All I can promise is perhaps some promiscuity and a little credit card debt.
For this issues’ sloppy.. I got a text message from my cousin whose wife is producing a film in NYC this spring, they were beginning to location scout:
I wish I got texts like every day.. Here was my response, did I miss anything??
I blame a January cold for my lack of IRL shopping secondhand or otherwise this month.. but on my list to check out is Sobrara & Ven Space.
shop girl.
I shop more than I date, here is everything I bought or saw recently:
This sheer cardigan from J.Crew is my new obsession.
I bought this print in a LA Photo fund sale, it is by artist Alexandra Cabral.
Ghia’s Le Fizz is on subscription at my house, perfect for entertaining.
It would not be the first time that I bought something because of Emma Chamberlin, these glasses are really fun for spring.
Thank god, Crown Affair released their towel in black. My current one has been stained with red hair dye.
Tibi’s new Creative Pragmatist book is a perfect insight into how to dress.
I saw these earrings in Mexico City at a boutique next to Casa Pedregal called Tetelan and I can’t stop thinking about them.
$300 for two ceramic potatoes. Perfection.
I love this new rug from Beni’s collection. Understated and chic.
I need this belt reco’d by my pal
.Even though I don’t smoke, I am eyeing Edie Parker’s new lighter for candles and incense.
I bought this deck of Marina Abramovic cards in Paris a few years ago. The subhead reads “Instructions on How to Reboot Your Life”. It now sits prominently on my coffee table for guests and moments of boredom.
Stay tuned for a big announcement at the top of March :)
xx
This is woooonderful!
I also can't help but make a funny connection here: Charles Eames was born in St. Louis.
I gobbled this up! Such a fun read. And for the record, I’m married to a man from St Louis and he adores a button up. He’s a solid, grounded individual. ✨