Seven Design Tastemakers on Their Biggest eBay Scores — and Secret Expert Shopping Tips

We talk at length in our forthcoming book, How to Live With Objects, about the joys of getting lost in the online shopping process on your way to building a more personal home, and about how shopping, even if you don't buy anything, can help you learn about makers and movements as you define or refine your taste. There's really no better place to do that than eBay. Today, we asked seven tastemakers and shopping experts to share their favorite eBay finds, as well as their top shopping tips and current favorite saved searches (because as every shopping expert will tell you, you *must* have saved searches).
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Vaspaar, an Up-and-Coming Digital Design Gallery, Looks at Collecting As an Act of Preservation

For Kaisha Davierwalla and Andrea Grecucci, the Milan-based designers who run the digital gallery Vaspaar, the art of collecting amounts to more than simple acquisition. It’s not merely about possessing a beautiful material object — though Vaspaar offers plenty of those — but an act of preservation. Whether that’s preserving “something from the passing of time, or as a token of memory, a symbolic representation of an era, or the significance of an object and the emotions involved,” they explain, “we look at the act of collecting from both a deeply academic viewpoint and also from how personally we tend to get attached to these pieces.”
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Inside the Curio-Filled Tribeca Loft of Table of Contents Founder Joe Magliaro

I knew, going in to photograph Table of Contents founder Joe Magliaro's Tribeca loft for a collaboration we’re launching with IKEA to celebrate the Swedish company’s new SAMMANHANG collection, that we’d have plenty of fodder. What I didn’t know was how thoughtfully Magliaro approaches the collecting of objects, and how much those collections will permeate any conversation you have with him about design.
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Design Miami’s Rodman Primack Gives Us a Tour of His Collection-Filled Home

Rather than squirrel away his accumulated possessions in some hidden storage space, Design Miami's Rodman Primack chooses to live with and share the things he collects in his everyday life. “There are people who are equally aesthetic and equally interested in art and design but who don’t feel any need to actually physically have the item with them," he says. "Clearly, I feel a need to have objects — to be able to touch them, look at them, hold them, and actually use them.”
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These Woven, Color-Field Canvases Look Almost Like Paintings

Brooklyn artist Ethan Cook is sometimes referred to as a painter, but we've yet to find an instance of him actually putting a brush to canvas. When we first started following Cook's work, after an introduction in 2012 from Iko Iko in Los Angeles, he was manipulating canvases by way of bleaching and dyeing the fibers; he then moved on to combining hand-woven canvases with store-bought ones in a kind of super high-end, abstract patchwork. His work for the past few years, though, has involved making large-scale woven pieces entirely by hand on a four-harness floor loom — our favorite iteration yet.
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Starting a Contemporary Design Collection? Check Out This New Online Auction Series

An online auction launched this week by Sothebys features only 23 pieces, from a Colorado gallery called Maker + Place, but it represents something bigger — the start of a new series of no-buyer's-reserve, online-only design sales that the art-auction giant plans to repeat regularly with different curators and assortments. Because they'll focus solely on contemporary pieces, with diverse price points and a super-straightforward bidding process, they're perfect for anyone starting a collection.
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Sam Amoia New York interior designer

Inside the Zen-like Space of One of New York’s Top Interior Designers

Walk into any number of chic boutiques in the world —the Calvin Klein flagship on Madison Avenue, Dior in London, Dover Street Market in New York — and you're bound to see the work of Samuel Amoia, the interior designer–turned–furniture phenom who's shot to stardom in the last few years making pieces that mix high and low materials, and incorporate healing minerals and crystals such as amethyst, malachite, pyrite, onyx, and agate. But there's one place you won't find many examples of Amoia's work — in the spare, textural one-bedroom Chelsea apartment he's shared for five years with his boyfriend, Enrique, and two dogs, Pig and Bruno.
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Anthony Sperduti Hamptons home tour

Anthony Sperduti’s Art-Filled Hamptons Hideaway

Partners & Spade's Noho storefront closed in 2014, as the brand grew up, evolved, and moved into swankier digs on Lafayette Street. But I was happy to see its spirit alive and well when I walked into Anthony Sperduti's Sag Harbor cottage for the first in an editorial series we're doing with SONOS on the homes of some of New York's most interesting — and influential — creatives. Sperduti's weekend Hamptons house, tucked away in a quiet corner on the Sag Harbor Bay, is our favorite kind of home — the perfect mix of vintage and contemporary art and objects, each with a fascinating story behind its acquisition.
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The Curator of Philly’s Legendary Barnes Foundation on her Favorite Pieces From the Collection

In 2002, when the Barnes Foundation announced a plan to move from its original location in Merion, Pennsylvania, to nicer, big-time architect–designed digs in Philadelphia, there was a bit of an uproar. How, devotees of the collection wondered, could anything ever replicate the obsessiveness with which Alfred C. Barnes — the quirky early 20th-century art enthusiast who amassed the collection — originally arranged things? When the new building, designed by Tsien & Williams, opened last year, those people breathed a sigh of relief at its apparent fidelity (every room is the same dimension as its counterpart in Merion, and everything was reinstalled to one-sixteenth of an inch.) But here’s something even more freeing: visiting the Barnes as we did, knowing next to nothing about the whole endeavor and therefore being able to judge the collection on its own merits.
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Max Lamb’s Personal Collections

At the London Design Festival in 2009, Apartamento magazine collaborated with local furniture wunderkind Max Lamb on a show called “The Everyday Life Collector.” The title referred to Lamb’s father, Richard, who had spent more than 15 years surrounding himself with British studio pottery, of which 400 examples were on view. But while age might have given him a leg up in the volume department, it turned out that the elder Lamb wasn’t the only one with the collecting bug: Max, too, admitted to joining his dad at flea markets from time to time and almost never coming home empty-handed. So when we had the idea to start a new column called Inventory — for which we’d ask subjects to photograph a group of objects they found meaningful — we turned to Max first, and he didn’t disappoint. He sent us 10 images of the collections on display in his live-work studio in London, then gave us a personal tour.
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