Pickin’ through Chester County with Tara Dugan
WE ALL have one great treasure that we constantly seek. If you regularly visit garage sales, auctions or dumpsters, you probably peer into the far corners of whatever place you are scouring in search of the thing that will make your pulse quicken. Sure, you content yourself with other finds while you continue your quest, but like true love, your heart reacts to what it’s after. Is it a Honus Wagner? The Beatles on vinyl? The Franciscanware creamer to replace the one you broke in your mother’s set, leaving the sugar bowl useless and lonely? Although I carry a dog-eared, black-and-white composition book with my customers’ needs, my own personal list is right between my ears.
My beach house is both very old and very crooked. I love it for all the happy memories, and I have come to regard it as lovely. My father deadpans in reply, “Even a mother alligator thinks her child is beautiful,” but that’s beside the point. The heart of the house is the low-ceilinged, slope-floored dining room, where family and friends gather around the long farm table. The mismatched chairs were either trash-picked or permanently borrowed from my sisters, and I dreamed of the perfect chairs. I had my heart set on Emeco chairs, those gorgeous, sturdy, lightweight, brushed-aluminum icons commonly called ‘Navy chairs.’ My wallet, however, had other ideas; Navy chairs cost about $440 each, new.
Although they made their mark in the middle of last century, Emeco chairs are still manufactured in Pennsylvania, where the website proudly informs you they are “made by 116 hands.” Emeco chairs, including model 1006 (the Navy chair) are constructed from 80% recycled aluminum. The chair, designed for use at sea, was found to be so durable that it quickly found a home in schools, hospitals, prisons, and all kinds of places where a tough chair would be required. The chair is so beautiful it also attracted attention from the Mount Olympus of design – both Frank Gehry and Phillippe Stark work with Emeco. Hotbeds like the Hudson Hotel in New York, employ Emeco chairs in their profiles. Since my crooked dining room doesn’t merit the attention of Phillipe Stark, I was left to dream.
Then, one day last spring at the Uniques & Antiques Modern Design sale in Aston, voila! a set of Emeco brushed-aluminum beauties. This sale of modern furniture brings dealers from New York , California and points in between, so I knew I would have competition. As the bidding began, the price rose but stayed in my range – very cheap for the chairs. I like to think it was my demeanor and steely gaze that dropped that last Brooklyn dealer out of the bidding, but truthfully, it may have been my squealing between bids that got rid of him, much the way you back away from a person muttering on the street.
