You would think that, for two longtime design dealers and collectors, moving in together would entail an agonizing, OCD-like process of visual choreographing and styling until everything looked magazine-level perfect. In the case of Kyle Garner and Kellen Tucker, though, you’d be mistaken — the couple may do magazine-level work for clients, but when it comes to their own home in Brooklyn’s Bed-Stuy neighborhood, it’s barely about looks at all. “The driving force is comfort,” says Tucker, who deals antique textiles through her shop Sharktooth. “If you close your eyes and walk into this house, does it feel good?” Garner, the furniture dealer and designer behind Sit + Read, who moonlights as a DJ, agrees: “We prioritize the feeling over the aesthetic,” he says. “Kellen is interested in crafting smells, and I’m really interested in sound. I don’t really design my own living space.” It’s not that their two-floor brownstone isn’t beautifully appointed, of course, just that it strives for a more visceral appeal.
Part of that has to do with the fact that not only is the house ultimately temporary (it’s a rental), the objects that populate it, by and large, are temporary as well. As dealers — who met via email a decade ago after Tucker discovered Garner’s blog — the couple almost never keep their finds forever; they cycle in and then out again, to her shop, or to his interior projects. They’ve had to train themselves to embrace that state of impermanence, and to value their own well-being more than they value their possessions, to prevent their obsession from burying them. That process took slightly longer for Garner than for Tucker, who kept the house almost empty before Garner moved in with her a year and a half ago. “Suddenly there were kitchen shelves filled with ceramics, and real furniture,” she recalls. “He’s much more of a homemaker than I am. The store takes up all of my energy, so the last thing I wanted was stuff in my house. It was a struggle to find a happy medium.”
Now, they both agree, there’s a good ebb and flow. Garner’s Sottsass lamps happily coexist with Tucker’s antique Persian rugs and Turkish flat-weaves, and Garner keeps himself stimulated by constantly moving things around. “One day a chair will be downstairs, and the next day it will be upstairs,” he says. “Or I’ll find a weird, rusty nail I like the shape of that will change how the mantel is arranged that particular week.” Tucker gives herself room to play, too. “I couldn’t stop buying dandelion paper weights for awhile,” she laughs. “Eventually I was like, enough, that has to go. I can’t help myself from buying weird folk objects that don’t have a place in my store, but eventually they end up in a corner, then outside, and then in a free bin somewhere. The trick is not to feel ownership over them — or feel burdened by them.” Adds Garner: “This apartment is an exercise in restraint.”
Garner and Tucker in their second-floor bedroom, which they painted a cozy shade of dark blue. The photograph above Tucker’s head was taken by Garner’s friend Paul Schiek. “It’s one of my favorite photographs I’ve ever seen,” says Garner. “I love waking up and seeing it every day. I traded him a really amazing Danish sofa for it.”
The photo that hangs over the couple’s dresser is extremely sentimental. “On one of our first dates, we figured out that our families had rented the same house in Cape Cod when we were kids, weeks apart,” says Garner. “About a year ago, while digging through a pile of discarded photos at Brimfield, I found a picture of the very same house, shot in the early 1950s. On the rug is my 12-year-old whippet Nia. In the winter she’ll lay in this spot motionless for a few hours while the sun passes by.”
The couple’s bed is covered with Tucker’s early experiments, “most notably the patchwork quilt,” she says. “It’s made entirely from antique linen scraps dyed every which way, mostly the wrong way. Dyeing is really scientific, a lot of trial and error. I have like 30 more quilts worth of those ‘errors.’”
Those textiles provide a nice textural contrast with the more modern aesthetic of the vintage objects Garner collects, like this bedside table and lamp, the latter of which he found in an antique shop in Paris.
At a flea market in Maine a few years ago, Tucker asked a vendor to buy this piece of fabric. “He explained to me that it was his poncho, and it was not for sale, nor had it ever been washed. He bought it in the ’60s in New Mexico when he was staying at Ghost Ranch, Georgia O’Keeffe’s spot, and wore it every day for years. I sat in his booth and we talked for hours. He gave the poncho to me by the end of the day. It’s still never been washed.”
Despite her appreciation for such weathered items, Tucker also has a soft spot for mirrors and disco balls. “The more mirrored shapes I brought into my life, the more fascinated I became with the science of fractured white light,” she says. “These are a few pieces of defective optical glass. They each distribute light so differently, and the way they interact with eachother, it’s like a morning laser show.”
The other half of the upstairs floor is devoted to what Tucker calls “the listening room” — her favorite room in the house. Garner, pictured here sitting in a new outdoor prototype of his Sit and Read Sling Chair, “hooked up speakers in the two adjacent corners of the room, above the windows. If you lay down in the center of the room — on my #1 favorite rug, a vintage Swedish Rya — it’s a soothing sonic sweet spot.”
Finish samples for the frames of said sling chairs.
Tucker standing in the entrance to the couple’s dressing room, which is just off the listening room. Hanging on the wall beside her is a vintage Turkish Tulu textile. “They’re typically shaggy high-pile rugs woven with angora,” she explains. “This one has nice wear to it, exposing the silky slubby warp yarn. I’m also a sucker for some sun fading.”
An old clothes rack juxtaposed nicely with an old Thonet-style bentwood chair.
Downstairs, the living room is a happy jumble of favorite finds from various eras. The rug is one of Tucker’s prized possessions — one of only three that she says she’ll never sell. “As a dealer, to hold on to a piece is a very deliberate decision. I’ve never seen another one like this. There’s no design or motif other than the border. You can’t see it in the photo, but the weaver started to do a pattern and then stopped, who knows why… I love that.”
The mantel is moreso Garner’s zone, from the crazy ’80s clock to the incredible triangular neon lamp in the center, designed in L.A. in the ’70s by Zimmerman Studios for Archigraphics. “It’s really hard to keep old clocks synced up, so I gave up trying a while ago,” he says. “The Tauba Auerbach clock on the left is the only one that keeps good time.”
A close-up of more of Garner’s mantel trinkets. “When I was a kid I had the bright idea to forge Babe Ruth’s signature on a dirty baseball and sell it to my neighbor to help pay for a BMX bike,” says Garner. “He gave me $5. When my mom found out, she made me buy it back, but secretly thought it was hilarious, and kept it all these years. The string man was made by Jorma, a deceased man whose estate sale was one of the best I’ll ever go to — he had the oddest, most fascinating collections. I like to think he made it to keep him company.”
A view of the other side of the couple’s living room. The vintage Jens Risom chair for Knoll peeking out at right is one of the first pieces of modern furniture that Garner ever bought. “I redid the straps about 10 years ago — it’s been with me for a long time,” he says.
That same chair sitting under a Doug Johnston light. In the fireplace at right is a steel sculpture that weighs 60 pounds. “My mom used to own a gallery and showed the work of this artist,” says Garner. “She never picked up her work after the show, and when the gallery closed a few years later, my mom gave a sculpture to each of her four siblings. My aunt gave me hers when she moved awhile back.”
Garner made these bookshelves out of a bunch of crates he got from an industrial salvage warehouse, held together with compression straps. “The idea is that when (if) we ever move again, I won’t have to pack up my books or records,” he notes.
Before they were dating, Tucker and Garner worked together styling an event for Hermès in which they used a bunch of clock parts as decoration. “The four-pronged thing between the brass deer head and the Sottsass lamp is actually a set of chimes from a mini grandfather clock,” Garner says. “We sort of fought over who got to take it home because it makes the most pleasing sound when you run your finger across it. Now it belongs to both of us.”
In addition to his design work, Garner has moonlighted as a DJ for the past 15 years, and is part of the group that throws Deep Trouble dance parties in Brooklyn. This is his home music studio. “I got the Keith Haring print from the Miranda July show at Partners and Spade a few years back,” he adds. “The little gray amp on the left I unearthed at the Laney Flea Market when I lived in Oakland, and got it for a song. It’s meant to be hooked up to a 16-mm projector but I use it to amplify and record drum machines. It has such a crazy sound. The slipmats are designed by Futura 2000.”
Garner also used to design sets for indie films. “We were wrapping a feature we’d shot in Brooklyn about ten years ago and going through our props when I found this polaroid of Biggie and Faith in an old photo album. It was taken during the shoot for the infamous Vibe Magazine cover, and it’s one of my most-prized posessions. Below it is the cigar Jay- Z gave me when I prop-styled a D’Ussé ad campaign a few years ago. I had it bronzed.”
“It’s a little hard to see the photograph in the frame, but I bought it at the aforementioned Jorma estate sale,” says Garner. “It’s a black and white snapshot of the television screen during the first moon landing, and the text on the screen reads: ‘LIVE FROM THE MOON.’”
Even on a difficult-to-examine shelf situated high above the couple’s kitchen, their object curation is incredibly considered.
A small sampling of Garner’s ever-growing Bennington pottery collection. “We had the chance to visit the factory this past summer,” he says. “Highly recommended!”
More curios displayed on the kitchen shelves.
A Sharktooth tote next to a Sit and Read tote next to a smiley face tote made by friends of Garner’s in L.A., Jona Bechtolt and Claire Evans. “It has a sad face on the other side. Sometimes I flip it around when I’m in a bad mood,” he says.
In the backyard, one last bit of evidence that Garner and Tucker are insatiable collectors — why have one great vintage watering can when you can have three?
At the London Design Festival in 2009, Apartamento magazine collaborated with local furniture wunderkind Max Lamb on a show called “The Everyday Life Collector.” The title referred to Lamb’s father, Richard, who had spent more than 15 years surrounding himself with British studio pottery, of which 400 examples were on view. But while age might have given him a leg up in the volume department, it turned out that the elder Lamb wasn’t the only one with the collecting bug: Max, too, admitted to joining his dad at flea markets from time to time and almost never coming home empty-handed. So when we had the idea to start a new column called Inventory — for which we’d ask subjects to photograph a group of objects they found meaningful — we turned to Max first, and he didn’t disappoint. He sent us 10 images of the collections on display in his live-work studio in London, then gave us a personal tour.
Designers around the world owe Johanna Agerman Ross a drink, or perhaps even a hug: Her new project, the biannual magazine Disegno, is devoted to letting their work breathe. “I always found it frustrating working for a monthly, because I couldn’t give a subject enough time or space to make it worthwhile,” says the former Icon editor. “For a project that took 10 or 15 years to make, it felt bizarre to represent it in one image, or four pages.” Founded by her and produced with the help of creative director Daren Ellis, Disegno takes some of the visual tropes of fashion magazines — long pictorial features, single-photo spreads, conceptual photography — and marries them with the format of a textbook* and the investigative-reporting ambitions of The New Yorker. The story about Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec which we’ve excerpted here, for example, fills 22 pages of the new issue and runs to nearly 3,000 words; it’s accompanied by images captured over two full days the photographer spent with the brothers, one in their studio and one at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, where they were installing their latest retrospective, “Bivouac.” And articles on Martin Szekely, Azzedine Alaïa, and Issey Miyake’s Yoshiyuki Miyamae are set either over lunch, or in the subject’s living room. The focus, says Agerman Ross, is on proper storytelling. “The people behind the project, the process of making something, even the process of the writer finding out about the story — that’s all part of it,” she says. “It’s the new journalism.” Obviously, we couldn’t agree more.
There's a reason why one of the first questions we always ask Sight Unseen subjects is "What did your parents do?" In the nearly two years we've been producing this site, it's become apparent that the ideas and habits of ultra-creative people usually germinate in childhood, and that the environments in which they were raised tend to have played a part — whether their formative years resembled those of Kiki van Eijk, whose father competed on the 1976 Dutch Olympic field hockey team but also taught her to paint, or Lauren Kovin, whose parents filled the house with Ettore Sottsass furniture. The more designers and artists in a given family, the more interesting things tend to get, which is why we decided to start this new Related column. In it, we'll periodically ask creative talents who are related to interview one another about their respective practices and what it was like growing up in close proximity. First up are brothers Lukas Peet, 24, and Oskar Peet, 27, up-and-coming designers who were born and raised in the Canadian mountain resort town of Banff, attended the Design Academy Eindhoven together, and whose Dutch-born father Rudi Peet immigrated to Banff in 1974 and has since established himself as a successful jewelry designer there.
