$1.7m is not enough to buy a chair

Are you sitting comfortably? Right, we can begin.

How much would you pay for this chair?

If your answer was anything below two million dollars, forget about it.

At Christie’s Auction House in Manhattan last night, the item failed to sell despite bids of up to $1.7m. The elegant piece of furniture was designed by Irish-born art decor legend Eileen Gray between 1917 and 1919.

There was a lot of buzz in the room when the piece came up for sale – because last year in Paris, a different chair by the same designer sold for a whopping €21.9m (over $29m). That chair had been in the collection of the late French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent and his partner. The sale set a new record high for a piece of 20^th century furniture.

So you can imagine the surprise when bids only reached $1.7m for this one. The auctioneer quickly passed the sale, which essentially means it was withdrawn because it was not enough to satisfy its current owners.

It is truly an astonishing thing to say – but I was in a room where someone offered to pay $1.7 million dollars for a chair, and it wasn’t enough. Moments later, another chair (bronze armchair by designer Armond Albert Rateau, if you must know) was sold, realizing over $2 million dollars.

I am not an art critic, nor an expert in design. So I cannot tell the difference between a two million dollar chair, and a sixty-thousand dollar one, or indeed one from the local antique shop for a few hundred bucks. But let me tell you my impressions of the chair. It was pretty. It was elegant. It certainly had style and class. No, I didn’t get to sit on it. But I did examine it up close and it is clearly a work of art.

So here’s some more juice about the Eileen Gray chair:  It is called Sirene, and is a “lacquered and painted beech armchair”, with a velvet seat and a signature mermaid motif on its back.  Ms Gray made it for her close personal friend and rumoured lover, a French singer called Damia.

So why didn’t it sell?

Who the hell knows! Maybe potential bidders were put off by the freakishly high price paid for the other chair. It certainly is not because Eileen Gray has diminished in anyone’s eyes. Indeed, minutes after the sale for her chair was passed, a wooden “brick” screen designed by her in 1923 realised $842,500. It’s an imposing piece, as much a work of art as a practical piece of furniture, and was one of two that Ms Gray kept in her own home in Paris through her life (the other one is owned now by the National Museum of Ireland and is on display at Collins Barracks).  A telephone bidder bought it – we don’t know who he is but can speculate that he is a private collector as he purchased several other items in the auction.

Overall, the sales of furniture during the one hour auction realized almost $8m dollars.

I’d never been to an auction like that before – it truly was a different world. Astounding sums of money being paid for what in the end of the day is just furniture. But its proof that design is truly and art, and those who know about it can appreciate it.

What now for that chair? Well the private collector in Colorado that owns it may yet find a buyer. It’s not uncommon in cases like this for private approaches to be made in the days following the auction.

As I left Christies and walked out into the Rockefeller Plaza and the freezing winter cold, all I could do was wonder what it must feel like to sit in a two million dollar chair.  I’m still trying to imagine it now as I write, sitting on a hard cheap chair that I assembled myself (one of a collection of four black plastic flat-pack chairs, designed for Door Store, circa 2009, $80!). 

I think the word is...rich.