Vicente Wolf

You’ve inspired me!! Your post yesterday, advice on a dining room, got me thinking about my dining room that needs some “tweaking”, but I have put it off for the design needs of my clients….. The picture I have had in mind for it (for years!!), is on pg 51 in Learning to See. The architecture of my room is similiar to that in the photo. It is a long narrow room, I have floor to ceiling windows on 1 whole wall, have wide plank oak floors, the walls and trim are the same hue (cream colored grass cloth with the trim the same cream). I love the mix of chairs around a table, I have never bought a set, starting from my first apt!! That is what first drew me to your work, seeing that you were mixing and adding “unexpected” elements in your designs, and doing it so beautifully, validated a lot of my design ideas and sensibility. Thank you!! I found a 1964 Baker sofa at an estate sale, low arms, low back, down cushions, that I had recovered in a neutral herringbone fabric that is on one side of a rectangular table. I have 2 dark brown wicker arm chairs, similar in shape to ones I’ve seen you use before, on the other side. I had 2 Ghost Chairs at the table, but moved them to another room because they seemed to “delicate” compaired to the “weight” of the other pieces. But seeing the Panton chair juxtaposed against the dark wood in your photo above, I think they would work in my room!! They have the sculptural effect I was looking for with the Ghost chairs, but have enough “presence” to stand up to the other elements in my room, which I want to keep. I found a Capiz shell light fixture the other day (while looking for fixtures for a client, a hazard of the job) that I think will complete the look. Thank you for continuing to be an inspiration!!!

I’ve always liked Panton chairs, but even though using them with antique pieces isn’t new, I think your pairing them with these particular sort-of-Art-Nouveau raj chairs is brilliant. One can almost imagine the striking silhouette of the antique chairs’ swooping arms & back serving as inspiration for both the more abstract lines of Panton’s chair & for the voluptuous, undulating curves of Eero Saarinen’s air terminals in NY & DC, which structures–thanks to the table bases–seem to hover like an unseen presence over the grouping. Either way, it’s a handsome space

What can I say? This sort of connect-the-dots thinking happens automatically to people who spend their formative years in darkened Art History classes, watching pairs of slides flashing before their eyes. A friend says art historians are the design world’s answer to conspiracty theorists, always seeing things that aren’t really there.