Modern approach to a garage sale

This weekend, Michael and Gabrielle Boyd of Santa Monica are having a sale to dispose of all the used furniture they no longer need.

Instead of putting up signs in their neighborhood and placing an ad in the Recycler, however, the Boyds called an old friend at Christie’s auction house in London. That’s where a somewhat elevated version of a garage sale will take place Sunday, with a gavel, a title -- “Modernism From a California Collection” -- and the hope of selling the 310 auction lots of castoffs for $1 million or more.

The Boyds are leading collectors of Modernist furniture and decorative pieces, many designed by famous names of 20th century art and architecture. The couple also move a lot. Since the late 1990s, they’ve gone from Oakland to New York City to Santa Barbara to Santa Monica.

The process of restoring and settling into the Oscar Niemeyer-designed house where they’ve lived with their two teenage boys since 2003, they say, made them realize it was time, metaphorically speaking, to once more clear the attic.

The auction gives their fellow Modern design enthusiasts a chance to decide whether furniture by the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles and Ray Eames might fit their scheme. Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Isamu Noguchi, Marcel Breuer, Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler are other name designers whose products will be on the block.

The move to Santa Monica “was a big part of it,” said Gabrielle Boyd. “We just can’t keep it all.”

Simon Andrews, Christie’s director of modern design, estimates that bidding could reach a peak of $31,000 each for a chair and a dining table by Breuer, a pine desk by Schindler and an aluminum armchair by Wright that, with its red-vinyl upholstery and hexagonal backrest, looks as if it belongs on the bridge of the starship Enterprise.

The icing, for Andrews, is the stuff one would expect to find at a garage sale. There’s a collection of toy ray guns from the 1950s and ‘60s, including a “Buck Rogers Atomic Pistol.” Other lots consist of tobacco pipes, 1950s microphones and a collection of souvenir patches and insignia.

“Water pistols might be humble, disposable, but to me they’re pieces that speak to that moment in time,” Andrews said. “The space race, that optimistic, democratic spirit.” He figures that collectively they can add $600 to $800 to the take.

Michael Boyd confessed he feels a twinge at parting with furnishings such as the red aluminum armchair and a pair of blue-cushioned stools also by Wright.

“But I do have other Frank Lloyd Wright pieces. You can’t have it all. You can’t hold it all,” he said. He’ll console himself with what’s left in his collection -- “probably 1,000 substantive pieces” dating from 1900 to 1965.

Boyd began buying Modernist furniture in 1981 after being dazzled by an exhibition of Breuer’s work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Today, the collection consists largely of the family’s house and its contents -- what they use every day to sit on, eat off or prop their feet on.

“Part of the whole Modernist ideal is functionality and lack of pretense,” Gabrielle Boyd said. Increasingly, these are pieces museums want to showcase. Witness “Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design and Culture at Midcentury” at the Orange County Museum of Art through Jan. 6.

Sixteen of the Boyds’ furniture pieces, most of them by Eames, are on loan to the show. Impressed by Michael Boyd’s knowledge, curator Elizabeth Armstrong had him contribute an essay to the exhibition’s catalog about how European Modernist design was transplanted to L.A. After closing in Newport Beach, “Birth of the Cool” will go on a 15-month tour to four other museums.

The Boyds -- he is 47 and she is 43 -- fed their collecting habit through the ‘80s and ‘90s with earnings from a music production company in the Bay Area, mostly from instrumental music that Michael would write and record for commercials and films. Since 2000, he’s spent full time in the design world as a consultant to other collectors and to people who want to restore and furnish Modernist homes.

An auction in London makes sense, Boyd said, because most of the pieces are by European designers who might excite continental bidders. Also, “it crossed our minds,” he said, that the dollar’s plunge makes it more lucrative to be paid in pounds.

Rare, prototype versions of Eames furniture -- such as a table the Boyds provided for “Birth of the Cool” -- have fetched six figures. But Boyd said it misses the point of Modernism to cherish rare, prototype-only pieces over products that were mass-produced.

“People fetishize rarity, but everyone, throughout the Modernist movement, was trying to get good design out there,” he said. “Eames did more than anyone else to achieve the dream of mass production and distribution, to get good design to the masses at an affordable price.”

mike.boehm@latimes.com