AN ODE TO EXTRAORDINARY DESIGN

PAPER Please tell us about your position as the editorial director of 1stDibs. What are your responsibilities? 

Anthony Barzilay Freund Prior to joining 1stDibs, I was a print magazine editor — at Esquire, Town & Country and Art+Auction — covering the worlds of art, design and culture more generally. I met Michael Bruno, the founder of 1stDibs shortly after he’d launched the site in the U.S. in 2000. He’d just moved back to the States from France, where he’d brought the Paris Flea Market online. At the time, I thought he was whip-smart and charismatic but also crazy to believe people would be willing to spend a lot of money on vintage and antique furniture they’d only seen on the Internet. Ten years later, I was working for him. Then, as now, my role is to tell the stories behind the remarkable objects on our site and celebrate the visionary men and women who sell them, buy them, creatively deploy them and create them. In 2016, we launched a New & Custom Furniture division, so our subjects are not just historical design figures but contemporary artists and craftspeople who are changing the ways our homes look and how we perceive beauty. We also have robust marketplaces for art, jewellery and fashion, so those topics are a vital part of our narrative mix as well.

As 1stDibs’ editorial director, I oversee our weekly digital magazine, Introspective, and our Study blog as well as the 1stDibs 50, our annual compendium of the world’s top interior designers.

P You have a strong editorial background that comes with a great sense of design. What is your relationship with antiques? 

ABF As a child, I was always drawn to the antiques in my grandparents’ homes. Especially pieces made of rich woods or with painted surfaces. And I wanted to know all about them: their origins, their materials and the stories about how they’d come into my family’s possession, and how they’d been used and cared for over the years. New stuff just didn’t catch my eye or pique my interest. Even as a Literature major in college, I was much more interested in old books than in contemporary novels and I especially loved the descriptions of the architecture and landscapes of those bygone eras. It wasn’t until my graduate studies in architecture that I began to appreciate the trailblazing, world-changing art and design movements of the 20^th century and, in turn, of my own time. Once you start to think not just about the objects themselves but the aesthetic and intellectual impulses behind their creation, it becomes much easier to find something to love about most things, regardless of their style.

P Do you have a favourite design period, era or school?

ABF While it’s true that I can find reasons to love nearly any style or period, there are some that I particularly love. These include Swedish Gustavian, American Queen Anne, English Arts and Crafts, French Art Deco, International Style, Italian mid-century modern and contemporary ceramics from anywhere.

P I’m sure you have a lot of pieces from 1stDibs in your home. Can you describe a few pieces, and do you have a favourite among them?

ABF One of our responsibilities as editors is to wander through 1stDibs to see what’s new, unusual or trending on the site. The daily temptation to hit the Purchase button is enormous, as you can imagine! While I’m usually able to exercise self-restraint, there are a few pieces that I have not been able to resist. These include a pair of sinuous candleholders by contemporary glass artist Jeff Zimmerman, which adorn our living room mantel and a duet of mirrored bedside tables attributed to Jacques Adnet. For our sunroom, we found a green-painted, vintage Bielecky Brothers rattan sofa and chair and a set of rustic wooden armchairs sold in a collection of pieces once owned by interior designer Juan Montoya. Then there’s our rustic, Swedish Hednabord table from the 18^th century and a quartet of blue-painted, provincial Gustavian chairs that now have pride of place in our kitchen.

You can see that the variety of things to be discovered on 1stDibs is mind-boggling. And that means not every purchase I’ve made on the site has been monumental. I also love our Georg Jensen stainless-steel paper towel holder, our set of green-glazed ceramic artichoke plates from the 1950s and our early 19^th-century lithograph of a brown bear — each found on the site for less than $100!

P 1stDibs carries both vintage products and contemporary design. How do you go about curating the assortment on the marketplace? 

ABF With more than 7,700 vetted unique sellers and 1.7 million items listed on the site, there really is something for everybody on 1stDibs and we’ve worked hard to help you find that perfect thing both through the search tools we’ve introduced over the years and through the curation of our merchandising team, which creates themed collections and choreographs prominent placements of interesting vintage and contemporary pieces. Our personalisation tools have also become more robust, so if, for instance, you’ve shown a propensity for contemporary lighting, we’ll make sure you’re seeing more contemporary lighting and fewer antique crystal chandeliers.

We’ve also recently introduced auctions to the 1stDibs site, some of which are organised around a particular style, period or theme or are curated by an outside tastemaker. Our auctions feature items our sellers are willing to let the market set the price on and sometimes, to the great benefit of buyers, they turn out to be great deals. The auction functionality is just one more entry point into our vast supply of treasures.

Finally, there are the stories that the editorial team chooses to tell, which help spotlight the best of all our categories while also focusing on the through-lines between vintage and contemporary pieces. Quality and craftsmanship and creativity transcend time and we believe every home should feature a mix of pieces from a variety of periods and places. One of our primary missions is helping people to understand why something is valuable and worthy of their attention, whether created a century ago or just last week.

P You now offer Sanayi313 furniture designed by Enis Karavil through Galerie Philia. What do you think these works bring to the design community showcased on 1stDibs? Does the design vision of the work reflect your own in any way?

ABF The 1stDibs seller Galerie Philia can be depended on to bring to our site the best of contemporary design created by a variety of makers from around the world. It’s no surprise to me that Sanayi313 is well represented on the Galerie Philia 1stDibs storefront because the pieces they create are characterised by inventive, beautiful materials and quality workmanship. There’s an elegant interplay between the relative simplicity of the forms and their vibrant surfaces. I particularly like the ash table, with its thick cylindrical legs and richly figured, burled top. On the other end of the price spectrum, the V Vase, one of which I own, is a simple – yet utterly original – way of displaying a long-stemmed flower or green-blooming branch.

“At 1stDibs, we have a rich cache of material in the Ottoman or Byzantine style, historic pieces that were either produced in Turkey or created elsewhere for the Turkish market. All these pieces, with their distinctive patterning, silhouettes, and colour palette, bring to mind a journey I made to Turkey in the late 1980s when I was a young man. I spent several days in Istanbul and I still carry with me the memories of the architecture, light and distinctive soundtrack of that monumental city gently rising up from the Bosporus. I’m long overdue for a return visit.”