- 27 July 23 new stock - A style that we love, that has been copied a lot, is a form of club chair called a cube chair, for obvious reasons. It was made famous in 1971 by Charles Pfister for Knoll and it is sold by Knoll to this day. It captures the essence of modernism, in Pfister’s own words they are “useful, sculptural, wonderfully constructed objects.” But the idea of a chair as a cube, or a cube as a chair, goes back much further. Further even than Le Corbusier’s LC2 and LC3. It goes back to the architect, Josef Hoffman’s Cubus Club chair – people find it hard to believe that this chair was already designed in...
- 21 July new stock - Days like today are fantastic for Camp Huisraad Modern, since we have so many new quality vintage pieces to offer. We have quite a few DS Vorster pieces, like a set of dining chairs that must be the best combination of elegant design and quality craftsmanship in a mid-century modern dining chair in South Africa, a queen-sized kiaat headboard with integrated pedestals, a wonderful coffee table, that we would happily choose as a centrepiece for our own home. We rarely have more than one vintage haberdashery cabinet per month, but today we have two newly restored ones, and they are special,they have the same look and size, except that one is 183 cm and the...
- 7 July new stock - Those who know something about the Scandinavian furniture revolution in the mid previous century will understand the thrill of finding a set of ten vintage ‘China Chairs’ by Hans Wegner. Our thrill is reserved, though, because it remains undetermined whether this set is original. The chairs have been refinished in the past, and it could be that the maker’s marks were removed. Many copies of this famous chair exist, though. If these are representations, they are good ones. We know they were bought in the 1970’s. We know they are solid and that the seats were previously redone in leather. We restored some joints and resealed them black. We priced them as copies (the...
Nowadays we see it as normal and healthy for men to groom and look after their skin and hair and nails. Beard oils are a flourishing industry and cosmetics on men raise few eyebrows. Yet, there is a certain culture of gentleman’s grooming that is a thing of the past. I caught the last flickering of this as a child while watching my dad shave. The switchblade was decades in the past, but he still used a brush to apply his shaving cream and he must have been one of the last men to still use safety blades, before disposable cassette-like razor blades came in. Shaving used to be a ritual. To work up the lather and apply it, took...
The haberdashery counter that Huisraad Modern offers this week is a special one, since it was rescued from a bicycle shop that closed in Bellville recently. When we say “bicycle shop”, we’re not talking about the professional retailers that put up shop since the early nineties under the name of some former Rapport Tour champion rider. These modern style bicycle shops focused mainly on road racing or the emerging sport of that time, mountain bike racing. No, we’re talking about the old bicycle shops of which each town had one or even two. We’re talking about the traders, in many cases an Indian family, who sold back-peddle “dikwielfietse” or black delivery bikes with the steel cage on the front and...
