Furniture

Pam Chandler decided to accompany her husband, Bob, to the extraordinary auction of an Ocean City, N.J., mansion Saturday to keep him from "going overboard. " But an hour after she toured the 7,000-square-foot Victorian-style house on the Great Bay, she was the one prodding him to stay in the frenzied bidding on the breezy bayside veranda. The Chandlers, who live in Rumson, Monmouth County, with their three children, won the auction, ultimately paying $3.9 million for a property that was listed at about $6.5 million two years ago. It is assessed at $5 million.

OCEAN CITY, N.J. - Luxury appointments abound in the 7,000-square-foot, 12-year-old Victorian-style mansion overlooking Great Bay, such as a marble fireplace that once graced a Biddle estate mansion, a crystal chandelier that at the touch of a button lowers from the 30-foot foyer ceiling for cleaning, and boat slips big enough to berth a pair of yachts. A "smart house" system controls window treatments, lighting, heating, air-conditioning, and music. Slate-covered turrets, little secret gardens, and gingerbread-laden porches make the exterior look more like Cape May than Ocean City.

Upholstery is a dying field - or at least that's what everyone always told John Price, a 44-year-old Mayfair resident who has been in the business since graduating from high school. After he lost his job at Old City's Regent Upholstery, where the owner retired last year after more than half a century, he almost started to believe it. So Price was surprised to get a phone call from Portside Arts Center, where students had been clamoring for several months for someone to teach them the not-quite-lost art. "I never thought there was much interest," he said.

Designer furniture from throughout the 20th century and related decorative arts will be featured at sales this weekend and next. Another sale next week will offer lesser known treasures of the 1900s. The first designer furniture event will take place on Saturday when Kamelot Auctions will offer more than 700 lots of furniture, lighting, statuary, Asian art, and glassware, notably two rare pieces of Lalique, at a sale beginning at 10 a.m. at its gallery in the office complex at 4700 Wissahickon Ave. Online bidding and an auction catalog with presale price estimates are available at www.kamelotauctions.com . The Lalique pieces are both opalescent glass vases just over 9 inches high, depicting frenzied Bacchantes.

Major two-day catalog auctions next weekend will offer a study in the contrasting styles of American furniture and appointments. Both sales will feature items expected to bring five-figure prices. Beginning at 6 p.m. next Friday, Pook & Pook Inc. will offer more than 300 lots of 18th- and 19th-century furniture, art and accessories at the first session of a 900-lot sale that includes Pennsylvania cabinetry, quilts, and other local crafts, as well as furniture from other regions.

Joe L'Erario and Ed Feldman, those two goofs from the neighborhood, are back fixing furniture on Channel 12. The sophomore season of their Furniture on the Mend got off to an abortive start last week when somebody broadcast the fourth episode in place of the first one. Baffled viewers came in on Part 4 of a reupholstering and refinishing project. No, it wasn't just another On the Mend joke. These characters - Feldman grew up in the Northeast, L'Erario in South Philly - will joke about anything, but as craftsmen and furniture experts, they take pains to make their projects understandable.

Fine furniture collectors take note: Common Pleas Classic - with its spartan style and costly political veneer - could be headed for investment stardom. There won't be a gala unveiling of the '92 models because the court's mill shop has been shut down. No longer will patronage workers, paid about $500,000 a year in salary and benefits, churn out bookcases and desks, credenzas and tables. Appreciation, therefore, should be the watchword - particularly for taxpayers who were paying for a mill whose supervisors had no idea how much it cost to build furniture for judges and court bureaucrats.

Everything goes when it comes to furniture these days. But within that umbrella of freedom, some trends were noticeable at the fall furniture market: Bamboo, wicker and rattan were everywhere, at all price ranges. Used in a limited way - as a side table or chair - these popular, casual materials can tone down an otherwise formal room or provide a touch of the tropics. They also can be used as main furniture pieces, to create chic, comfortable rooms. Material mixing was rampant.

Frankford Avenue is to furniture what the Main Line is to plastic surgery: You want a custom job, there's an outfit that can handle it - from Morry's Dinettes (8109 Frankford Ave.) up near Pennypack Creek, which specializes in reupholstering dinette chairs, to Pappajohn Woodworking (4355 Orchard St.), near the El in Frankford, specializing in custom hardwood millwork, cabinets, and furniture that can run to the many thousands of dollars Summerdale Mills , next to Morry's at 8101 Frankford Ave., sells drapery and upholstery fabric to do-it-yourselfers and also builds custom-scaled sofas and chairs, sized as you like to fit odd spaces.

Over the next eight days, auctions will be coming out of the woodwork. A two-day sale this weekend of 20th-century design furniture will feature the tree-slab experiments of George Nakashima. One sale next Saturday will offer period pieces from the days of King Charles II; another will offer a specimen of furniture carving known as "treenware. " This weekend's sale will take place in Lambertville, where the Rago Arts & Auction Center, 333 N. Main St., will offer more than 1,100 lots of furniture and decorations at sessions beginning at noon today and tomorrow.

Here's something I do that might be crazy: I rearrange the furniture. Often. Blind people don't stand a chance in my house. And most of the time, neither do I. Rearranging the furniture is one of my favorite bad habits. My most favorite bad habit is eating chocolate cake, and my least favorite bad habit is marrying badly. It all began with an ottoman, which somehow expanded into the Ottoman Empire. Let me explain. I was sitting on my couch in the family room, working on my laptop with the TV on. I went to put my feet up on the coffee table, and my foot knocked over a mug of coffee.

Bold, dramatic, and invigorating, tangerine tango is dancing its way into home-decor trends in 2012 with a punch of reddish-orange panache. The hue is a vivacious alternative to last year's honeysuckle, and design experts say it's easy to incorporate. Pillows, bedspreads, and tabletop accessories in this high-impact color can add spice to any room. Or add tangerine appliances and personal electronics for an unexpected pop of color, says Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Institute, the research arm of Pantone Inc. of Carlstadt, N.J., which sets color standards for the home and fashion industries.

Once upon a time, furniture purchases, like marriages, were supposed to last forever. You know what's happened to the latter. As to the former, a growing movement's afoot to breathe new life into tables, chairs, and breakfronts that were once landfill-bound, or destined for eternity beneath a sheet in Aunt Ethel's attic. If cynics think these pieces land in flea markets waiting for the down and out, think again. Jeffrey Cofsky, owner of Consignment Furniture Gallery in Cherry Hill, says his customers have high incomes.

Upholstery is a dying field - or at least that's what everyone always told John Price, a 44-year-old Mayfair resident who has been in the business since graduating from high school. After he lost his job at Old City's Regent Upholstery, where the owner retired last year after more than half a century, he almost started to believe it. So Price was surprised to get a phone call from Portside Arts Center, where students had been clamoring for several months for someone to teach them the not-quite-lost art. "I never thought there was much interest," he said.

Designer furniture from throughout the 20th century and related decorative arts will be featured at sales this weekend and next. Another sale next week will offer lesser known treasures of the 1900s. The first designer furniture event will take place on Saturday when Kamelot Auctions will offer more than 700 lots of furniture, lighting, statuary, Asian art, and glassware, notably two rare pieces of Lalique, at a sale beginning at 10 a.m. at its gallery in the office complex at 4700 Wissahickon Ave. Online bidding and an auction catalog with presale price estimates are available at www.kamelotauctions.com . The Lalique pieces are both opalescent glass vases just over 9 inches high, depicting frenzied Bacchantes.

In the few years when she had her own interior-design business, Beth Baker redid dozens of swank Bucks County homes, and, in the process, saw truckloads of castoff furniture consigned to dumps and thrift shops. She loved the decorating, hated the discarding. Surely, she thought, there were struggling families whose lives could be made more comfortable, and their spirits buoyed, by a gently used sofa or dining table, a like-new lamp, or a chest of drawers. Baker resolved to find those families.

It's not a pairing that automatically comes to mind - the prints of Picasso and the furniture of Wendell Castle - but the cofounder of cubism and the art-furniture patriarch look as if they were made for each other in Wexler Gallery's current exhibition, "The Abstract Forms of Pablo Picasso and Wendell Castle. " Picasso's curved and voluptuous lines on paper echo in Castle's three-dimensional forms, and vice versa. That the 13 Picasso works are predominantly black- or brown-on-white and the six Castles are monochromatic emphasizes the relationships between forms.

When the Pine Valley Covered Bridge in central Bucks County was refurbished last year, the discarded timbers would have ended up as kindling were it not for John Cressman's ingenuity. Give the historic oak remnants to woodworking students to craft into furniture that they then could sell, he suggested. Could any lover of local heritage, or of covered bridges everywhere, resist such provenance? The answer was just as Cressman suspected. As trestle and side tables emerge from piles of worn wood at the Upper Bucks County Technical School, students already have 40 orders from near and from as far as Pittsburgh and Erie.

Artist Josh Leach is riding his canvas down the street, doing flips on it, falling off, riding it some more. When he wears this skateboard out, it won't go in the trash. Leach will give it another life by carving the deck into the face and body of a wild character he has dreamed up, and filling in the edgy cartoonish creature with acrylic paint. "I've always just collected my boards after I break them. It's like the board's second chance," he says in the cluttered South Philadelphia basement where he creates his art on a small table next to a broken washing machine.

  Pook & Pook Inc.'s first big sale of the new year will open with items from two important collections. One comes from a well-known collector, the other is surrounded with a bit of mystery. Both groups will be offered at the first session of the two-day, 1,100-lot event next weekend at the gallery in Downingtown. The first and better-known offering consists of antique furniture and appointments from the collection of Margaret Berwind Schiffer of West Chester, author of Furniture and Its Makers of Chester County, Pennsylvania . They will be offered at the start of the 290-lot session beginning at 6 p.m. next Friday.