By Lisa Hix — Tall windows flood the vast dining room with natural light, illuminating a minimalist mix of rectangular and round tables—each ringed by tasteful, Modernist chairs—beneath a grid of industrial light fixtures and exposed wooden beams. Is this the city’s hottest new restaurant that everyone's been talking about, the one with the locally sourced ingredients served on artfully presented plates? No, it's the new T.G.I. Friday’s. “It was like you opened the door to your grandmother’s attic, and...

Priceless Tiffany Collection Flees One Earthquake Zone, Lands in Another

By Ben Marks — How would a priceless collection of Tiffany glass survive a catastrophic earthquake? Takeo Horiuchi didn't want to find out. As one of the world's most respected and passionate collectors of Louis Comfort Tiffany glass, lamps, and other decorative objects, Horiuchi learned last year that the new museum he was planning to build for his incomparable collection of fragile masterpieces was located in a highly active earthquake zone. Fearful that almost 20 years of effort might be turned into...

Tiffany Lamp Appraiser Arlie Sulka: An Interview with Collectors Weekly

By Maribeth Keane and Brad Quinn — When I was an art history major in college, there were very few programs that had a concentration in the decorative arts. So when I graduated, I thought I’d be working with paintings, sculpture, and prints.In 1979, when I was working at Plaza Auction Galleries, a small auction house in New York, I met Lillian Nassau, and she asked me to work for her. I’ve learned almost everything I know on the job. I ended up in the Art Nouveau department at Plaza because that’s where the opening was. I...

The Social Agenda of Art Nouveau

By Elisabeth Horth — Art Nouveau was a huge movement. It wasn’t only about architecture; it touched every artistic discipline. It dealt with architecture, of course, but also with furniture, pottery, painting, and embroidery. In an Art Nouveau home, the artists took care of everything—the jewelry, the dress of the patron, the furniture, the garden, the lights and lamps, the stained-glass windows, the staircase, even the wallpaper. Before Art Nouveau, the decorative arts were divided into separate...

Antique Oil Lamps and Chimneys

By Maribeth Keane — My grandparents were antique collectors all their lives, their whole house was furnished in antiques. They had a lot of oil lamps and I suppose that’s where I got my first interest. I’ve always had more of an interest in the glass lampshades than the lamps but it kind of just evolved into lamp collecting instead of glass, and not pattern glass per say, just colored glass. I started out collecting miniature lamps and built up a collection of maybe forty, nothing high end, just mid range...