By Katrina Burroughs | June 7 2008
I was living in SoHo, and saw his amazing gallery. Itโs a museum of late 20th-century furniture. You get an education in there โ itโs like walking into a great book on the period. I hung out for over an hour the first time and his choices really hit me.โ This design enthusiast is the multiple-Grammy-winning rock star Lenny Kravitz and heโs talking about New York antique dealer Todd Merrill.
Since Kravitz first entered Merrillโs extraordinary emporium on Bleecker Street, Kravitz has amassed an enviable collection of the great names of late 20th-century American furniture: Karl Springer, Willy Rizzo and Paul Evans.
Kravitz says of Merrill: โHis taste is impeccable โ heโs absolutely the best at what he does.โ Merrill says of Kravitz: โHeโs a very advanced collector. He is an artist and the furniture is art, and he really gets it.โ
Kravitz explains his passion: โItโs growing up in the 1970s. I donโt know how much I was taking in at the time, but when I got older and I got into design, I gravitated to late 1960s and 1970s themes โ thereโs the same parallel in my music.โ Merrill specialises in rare custom- or studio-made furniture of that period, produced in limited numbers.
Having a famous clientโs endorsement will often boost the market in a collecting field. Just as art deco furniture enjoyed renewed attention when Mick Jagger was buying from Gordon Watson, and Keith Skeelโs idiosyncratic English taste was especially in demand when it became known that his fans included Donna Karan and Barbra Streisand, when Merrill exhibits at the Olympia fair in London this month, no doubt his association with Kravitz will cause buyers to look at his edgy pieces of โart furnitureโ with fresh eyes.
โThereโs a real sense, now, that their time has come again,โ says Merrill, delighted with the reawakened popularity of his favourite designers. โThe work is being rediscovered โ and prices are rising.โ
Their favourite piece? โItโs got to be โThe Monsterโ,โ says Merrill. โWhen I first saw it I thought it was the ugliest thing I had ever seen. A couple of days later I loved it. It is the most aggressive, far-out piece of furniture. Itโs one of Paul Evansโ harsher works, a 12ft-long console in bronze.โ
Kravitz, who has placed โThe Monsterโ at the top of a limestone staircase in his Paris townhouse, agrees that it is a true star. โItโs very heavy and masculine, very hard and sexy and monumental. Very expressive and thereโs even some romance to it. I really love that combination.โ
