Checking Out the Cream of Design Pros’ Props
You get suspicious sometimes. You go to an Alice Cooper concert, have nightmares for days, and then find out that Alice plays golf. It couldn’t be more incongruous, you think, if Dracula did needlepoint.
You wonder. Hulk Hogan, who does a pretty good impersonation of a deranged jungle beast with laryngitis, also does deodorant commercials and shills for children’s vitamins. What next? Will Yogi Berra take out a library card? Will Eddie Murphy enter the seminary? Will Mother Teresa reveal herself as a whiz at stud poker? Will Candice Bergen throw over her shrimpy French film director husband and marry, say, me?
It’s a strange and contradictory world out there. We could discover that Saddam Hussein writes fan letters to the Care Bears the same week we learn that Mister Rogers secretly longs to be a roadie with Ozzy Osbourne (who probably plays golf with Alice Cooper).
What do the pros do when they’re not being pros? Does Julia Child gorge on Twinkies and own stock in Pizza Hut? Does Sir John Gielgud watch the Three Stooges? Does Zubin Mehta love rap? It’s enough to make you dizzy. Inquiring minds wanna know !
Right, then. Let me disabuse you of one notion that may have been keeping you awake at night and pondering your way agonizingly into the dawn: Interior designers do a pretty good job of decorating their own homes.
Confess. You wondered about it. “Hmmmm,” you thought, gazing around at the spiffy new environment your designer assembled for you. “Does this guy do as well for himself or does he go home every night to a rabbit warren that Pa Joad would sniff at?”
If the items assembled for the “Dealer’s Choice” exhibition this weekend at the Decorative Arts Study Center in San Juan Capistrano are any yardstick, I’d say the designers are living pretty well. Part of the second Capistrano Antiques Show put on as a fund-raiser by the center, the exhibition shows off furniture and decorative items that many of the 37 dealers participating in the show have skimmed off the top of their stock and kept for themselves.
This is the stuff that the designers and dealers thought was so completely terrific that they couldn’t bear to part with it, even for a good chunk of money. So they carted the stuff home, reducing their profit margins but lining their personal nests with some pretty intriguing feathers. A few of them:
* A pair of brass English candlesticks, circa 1680
* A covered German tankard, circa 1750
* A 19th-Century tobacco jar in the shape of an ape’s head
* A pair of 18th-Century English ladies’ silver shoe buckles
* A pre-Colombian Peruvian burial mask
* A mid-19th-Century American hooked hearth rug
* A ceramic majolica camel, English, circa 1870
* A late 17th-Century Chinese porcelain vase, a handled mug and a plate
* A Chinese bronze pot from around the 3rd Century BC
* A pair of ironstone fruit coolers, circa 1820
* An early 19th-Century watercolor by Jean Pierre Redoute
* Tang dynasty tomb figures from AD 800
All this stuff will be on display at the center, at 31431 Camino Capistrano from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. today and from noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. The antique show will be held in a large tent on the athletic field across the street. An admission fee of $10 gets you into the tent, but the exhibition at the center itself is free to the public.
The “Dealer’s Choice” part of the show was dreamed up by the center’s new director, Richard Madigan, who knows his artifacts. Before coming to San Juan, Madigan worked as the director of several museums on the East Coast.
When he asked the dealers participating in the antiques show to provide one or two pieces from their private collections for an ancillary exhibit, “they jumped at the chance.”
They recognized, he said, that “people want to know what (the designers) do when they close that door at night. What do they keep? They might come to the exhibition and say, ‘I wonder why that person collected that camel?’ I’m hoping it’ll get people thinking a little bit.”
He also hopes that it’ll get people out of the tent across the street and into the center itself, if briefly, “to see what they’re supporting here. “
And, said Madigan, you might even find that the notion that everyone has his price will be reinforced. He isn’t making any guarantees, of course, but he said that if your eye falls on an object in the dealer’s exhibit that would go perfectly in kids’ room (the Peruvian burial mask, say), the dealers might-- might-- entertain an offer. A big offer.
After all, it’d be like asking Alice Cooper to give up his sand wedge.