The Boston Home Decor Show
November 20th, 2016
Boston, Massachusetts
For exhibitors and visitors at the Boston Home Décor Show, in its third year at Boston’s Cyclorama building in the South End, the theme was juxtaposition—the sublime mix of antiques with the contemporary. Antiques and art met contemporary home design. There was much evidence overall of such blending, and dealers were gratified by highly successful results. Over the course of the four-day event, November 17-20, 2016, business was done and commissions and residual sales were robust.
The gala preview party on November 17 benefited DIFFA, Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS, and CRI, the Community Research Organization.
Throughout the show Trefler’s, the family-owned restorers of Newton, Massachusetts, provided complimentary restoration estimates for visitors’ heirlooms—photographs only.
From Cottage + Camp, North Egremont, Massachusetts, a pair of French iron armchairs was priced at $2200 and the baseball game board from the 1920s was $4500. A vintage Harvard subway sign repurposed as a tabletop was $1800. The gallery also showed a pair of fancy iron squirrel gates from the 1920s.
Furniture designer Dakota Jackson is also the designer in residence for Steinway & Sons, and he led a discussion of the ways in which people experience design. A reception by Boston gallery M-Geough Co. in its own booth followed his talk. M-Geough showed examples from Jackson’s new “Symphony Collection.”
Glen Leroux of Glen Leroux Antiques, Westport, Connecticut, chatted with a client.
Newbury, Massachusetts, dealer Joan R. Brownstein is well known in the antiques business as a dealer in first-rate American folk art portraits, paintings, and objects of interest since 1980. Her even longer career is less well known, however. For over 40 years Brownstein has been a working artist. At this show she decided to take a chance on a booth at the show and filled its walls with over 60 of her creations—cut-paper assemblages, colored pencil drawings, poured acrylic on board images, and photographic images, each offering deep study of its textural layers. Artists and designers loved her work. Brownstein’s poured acrylic images were priced at $2500 each. She also showed works in clay by Edwin and Mary Scheier, which she has collected for some time.
Market Stalls at the Boston Design Center, which had a booth at the show, provides antiques dealers space in a facility that presents mostly contemporary furniture and accessories from interior designers. Shoppers can see how the antique and the contemporary blend and enhance each other.
Designers such as Jewett Farms + Co., Boston, which specializes in fine cabinetry, soapstone surfaces, and flooring, had a very productive show, which resulted in commissions of interest.
For information, see (www.bostonhomedecorshow.com) or call (617) 363-0405.
Landry & Arcari, Boston, Salem, and Framingham, Massachusetts.
Leonards Antiques, Seekonk, Massachusetts, refits and restores beds using vintage bedposts, rails, and headboards in the process. Leonards also sells antiques. The 19th-century Dutch embossed cushion mirror was tagged $8200, and the 18th-century Dutch inlaid marquetry tall chest was priced at $6800.
Market Stalls at the Boston Design Center provides antiques dealers a presence where designers and their clients can integrate antiques into contemporary interiors.
The 35-year-old gallery Sedia, Boston, specializes in furniture reproductions made in Italy of early 20th-century master designs in Bauhaus and mid-century work and more recently in late 20th-century established and Italian manufacturers. The Sedia booth was busy, and good commissions were made.
Bruce Emond of Village Braider Antiques, Plymouth, Massachusetts, writes up a sale.
Originally published in the March 2017 issue of Maine Antique Digest. © 2017 Maine Antique Digest
