Furniture

  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.

Oskar Richard Huber, 78, longtime president of the Oskar Huber Furniture store chain, died Thursday in Abington Hospice at Warminster of complications from a heart attack three weeks ago. Mr. Huber was raised in Philadelphia's Lawndale section, where his father founded the furniture company in 1927. He attended high school at the Admiral Farragut Academy, a boarding school then in Toms River, N.J. After attending the U.S. Naval Academy for three years, he went to work in his father's business in 1956, helping to expand from the original store in Philadelphia to locations in Ship Bottom, N.J., and Southampton, Bucks County.

Beginning with the sale on Monday of a century-old single-owner collection of stickpins, auctions next week will offer the playful rather than the pricey. Monday's sale of stickpins will be conducted by William H. Bunch Auctions & Appraisals beginning at noon at the gallery at One Hillman Drive, on Route 202 South in Chadds Ford. It precedes by a day Bunch's sale on Tuesday of 500 lots of silver, glass, china, porcelain, furniture, and 200 lots of fine art. The approximately 200 pins are part of an early-20th-century collection amassed by A.M. Brinckle, a Philadelphia-based traveling salesman known as "the scarf pin man" according to images of news article clippings accessible with the catalog at www.williambunchauctions.com . (Both Monday's and Tuesday's sales will also be conducted on www.liveauctioneers.com .)

In some ways, the furniture-design exhibit at Philadelphia University's Paul J. Gutman Library couldn't be more commonplace. But that's exactly the point, says Gotz Unger, founding director of the university's industrial-design program. The exhibit features a simple-yet-functional, white, two-seater sofa, no frills. Nearby are a few chairs that look like seats that could be found in any office, along with a modern, plain, unadorned table - all very ordinary. Yet, they speak to the transformation in office design created by a young architect and her businessman husband, Florence and Hans Knoll, Unger said.

It wasn't until midway through his senior year at Rowan University that Michael Iannone discovered woodworking. "I immediately had success with it," he says, whereas illustration, which he had studied for three years, had always been a struggle. Soon after graduating in 2000 he founded Iannone Design, known for furniture that mixes sustainable materials with uncluttered, midcentury lines and bold, nature-inspired graphics. The firm wasn't founded on sustainability, but after a few years of watching his eco-friendly pieces attract more attention and sales, Iannone decided to fold it into his mission.

DwellStudio founder Christiane Lemieux spends her days designing, writing, and tweeting her latest musings on design to her customers. To the delight of her 15,000 Twitter followers, this year came two Lemieux firsts: Her book Undecorate: The No-Rules Approach to Interior Design (Clarkson Potter, 2011) was published (it has already sold out of two printings), and her DwellStudio furniture collection debuted at 200 stores nationwide. She traveled to Philadelphia recently for a party at Dane Decor to celebrate the new 62-piece DwellStudio furniture collection that hit stores this month.

Operation central for Design Milk, the popular blog covering cutting-edge, international modern design, is a combo laundry room and office in a midcentury ranch house in Cherry Hill. The washer and dryer take up at least as much real estate as the desk and computer where Jaime Derringer, Design Milk's founder, posts six times a day to satisfy her more than eight million readers a year. Derringer was employed in medical marketing and publishing for eight years, working on the blog nights and weekends for three years until 2009, when it became her full-time gig. These days Jaime is at least as preoccupied with the house surrounding what her husband, Jordan, calls her "multitasking room.

Inclusion in a big, beautiful book called Furniture With Soul: Master Woodworkers and Their Craft (Kodansha International) can make the typical woodworker a bit sheepish, a bit more inclined to opine about curly oak than metaphysics. But to drop in on the two Philadelphia-area furniture makers among the 20 in the book - Jack Larimore out in rural somewhere-near-Bridgeton, N.J., and Michael Hurwitz, still in a street-level studio on Third near Market, but headed to Fishtown - is to be drawn in by their intensity, their devotion to creating, their contemplative approach to their craft.

Peter S. Given Sr., 86, of Huntingdon Valley, a retired vice president of SKF Industries who created miniature replicas of antique furniture, died of heart failure Wednesday, Aug. 24, at the nursing center at Rydal Park in Rydal. Mr. Given grew up in Glen Ridge, N.J. During World War II, he served in the Navy aboard landing craft in the Pacific and participated in the Battles of Iwo Jima and Saipan. After his discharge, he earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Lehigh University in Bethlehem.