Newest/Department
Hearing Sam Schonzeit talk about the dog sculptures he’s been making in his spare time — their faces clipped from an old breeders’ yearbook for Cavalier King Charles Spaniels he found at a thrift store — you can’t help but wonder if he catches the irony of it all. “These dogs look so nervous,” says the Marfa, Texas–based 37-year-old, a trained architect whose current day job is teaching at a local elementary school. “They’re pretending to be something else, and they’re sort of embarrassed that they’ve found themselves in this position. But that’s very human, which is why people like them — because everyone can relate to the feeling that you’re not where you’re supposed to be.” Ask Schonzeit if he ever considered pursuing a career as a conceptual artist, and sure enough, you get almost the same expression.
Believe it or not, Jason Miller’s a candle guy. Not to knock the chandelier that made him famous — or Roll & Hill, the eagerly anticipated lighting company he’ll launch this May — but there are times when the gentle glow of an incandescent filament just doesn’t compare to the real thing. After he renovated his new Brooklyn apartment last year, installing a carpeted conversation pit in the middle of the living room, Miller bought an armful of tapers and pillars from a shop in Woodstock and grouped them together on windowsills and side tables. It wasn’t long before he decided they needed their own purpose-built perch.
The piano — an upright, the kind you see in the back of saloons in Western movies — had been gathering dust at the antique shop for years. It sounded like hell, and its price had been marked down repeatedly. The tag said $300 the day Sebastian Errazuriz saw it, which struck him as a bargain considering he had zero intention of playing the thing: He would buy it, load it into a van with his brother, then string it up from the double-height ceiling of his Brooklyn design studio as a “constant reminder of the possibility of death — a kind of personal Post-It.”