This weekend, Michael and Gabrielle Boyd of Santa Monica are having a sale to dispose of all the used furniture they no longer need.
Instead of putting up signs in their neighborhood and placing an ad in the Recycler, however, the Boyds called an old friend at Christie's auction house in London. That's where a somewhat elevated version of a garage sale will take place Sunday, with a gavel, a title -- "Modernism From a California Collection" -- and the hope of selling the 310 auction lots of castoffs for $1 million or more.
The Boyds are leading collectors of Modernist furniture and decorative pieces, many designed by famous names of 20th century art and architecture. The couple also move a lot. Since the late 1990s, they've gone from Oakland to New York City to Santa Barbara to Santa Monica.
The process of restoring and settling into the Oscar Niemeyer-designed house where they've lived with their two teenage boys since 2003, they say, made them realize it was time, metaphorically speaking, to once more clear the attic.
The auction gives their fellow Modern design enthusiasts a chance to decide whether furniture by the likes of Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles and Ray Eames might fit their scheme. Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Isamu Noguchi, Marcel Breuer, Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler are other name designers whose products will be on the block.
The move to Santa Monica "was a big part of it," said Gabrielle Boyd. "We just can't keep it all."
Simon Andrews, Christie's director of modern design, estimates that bidding could reach a peak of $31,000 each for a chair and a dining table by Breuer, a pine desk by Schindler and an aluminum armchair by Wright that, with its red-vinyl upholstery and hexagonal backrest, looks as if it belongs on the bridge of the starship Enterprise.
The icing, for Andrews, is the stuff one would expect to find at a garage sale. There's a collection of toy ray guns from the 1950s and '60s, including a "Buck Rogers Atomic Pistol." Other lots consist of tobacco pipes, 1950s microphones and a collection of souvenir patches and insignia.
"Water pistols might be humble, disposable, but to me they're pieces that speak to that moment in time," Andrews said. "The space race, that optimistic, democratic spirit." He figures that collectively they can add $600 to $800 to the take.
Michael Boyd confessed he feels a twinge at parting with furnishings such as the red aluminum armchair and a pair of blue-cushioned stools also by Wright.
