Art: mid-century design | myMCMlife.com

“Lord, Give me an eye for treasures.”

08/09/2010

Originally posted September 20, 2008

That’s the simple prayer I said as we started our thrift store search this evening. About an hour later we walked out of Southern Thrift with this matching set of two end tables and a coffee table, each for only $4.99! We bought them because of their mid-century modern look and decent condition.(Our house begs us to replace our IKEA goods with real atomic jewels.) A gentle sanding and some lemon oil will go a long way. Once at home, Jason started cleaning them up while I googled the maker (stamped inside the drawers): American by Martinsville. Turns out each piece is worth anywhere from $100 to $500. Talk about an answer to prayer! Thank you Lord!! As tempting as it is to resell them, I think we just might keep them.

Tomorrow, once they’re all cleaned up and sitting in their new positions in the living room, I’ll take more pictures.

1 Comment | Art, Art: interior design, Art: mcm thrift store find, Art: mid-century design, Faith | Tagged: american by martinsville, prayer, treasures | Permalink
Posted by mahlbrandt

Reposting

08/05/2010

I wrote on a blog called East Nashville Atomic before I started this little blog. The beginnings of our mid-century modern journey are recorded there and I realized there are some posts about our first thrift store and estate sale finds that I’d like to repost here. The first one will be today followed by more next week.

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Posted by mahlbrandt

You are the shade to my lamp

08/04/2010

Every lamp needs a shade. At the time when Jason spotted this beautiful lamp as we were driving past the thrift store earlier this summer it had the ugliest Victorian style lampshade. We told them they could keep the shade.

At an estate sale a few weeks ago we found the perfect lampshade on an ugly lamp. The lamp was so ugly that it didn’t even deserve a photograph before we heaved it into the trash cart. Here’s the lamp with it’s new shade.

In a few months this lamp and shade will have a new home in Jason’s renovated studio but for now it’s waiting in hibernation.

2 Comments | Art, Art: interior design, Art: mid-century design | Tagged: lamp, mid-century, shade | Permalink
Posted by mahlbrandt

A New Addition!

08/03/2010

No, I’m not pregnant. Did I fool you for a second? This post is about an addition we’re adding to our home … sometime in the yet-to-be-determined future. As in, we’re just dreaming for now.

Our mid-century (1955) ranch is 1420 square feet. Plenty of room for two people. Plenty of room for two people who frequently work from home, even. It’s a 3-bedroom, 2 full-bath home* which allows us to have a comfortable master suite, a music studio for Jason and an office/craft room for me. (*Originally it was 3-bedrooms, 1 full-bath and a den.) The only problem is that we want to have kids. And we don’t want to move. Ever. We love our house and our garden and our neighborhood that much. Our lot is .36 acres and our house is average size for the neighborhood so there is justification for an addition. Commence daydreams of building on.

Commence? What am I saying. We’ve lived here 3.5 years and we’ve been talking about where and how and what we could build for 3.5 years. Just recently though, Jason was talking to one of our friends who is an excellent carpenter/handyman about some possibilities and suggestions. JB said, “If I was y’all I’d build off the front. You have a big front yard.” Jason heard less grass to mow. Current home layout:

We had never considered that. All of our previous ideas were to build off the back, near the driveway. A few days ago I had time to draw some sketches of how we could make it work. I love drawing out floor plans. Am I weird? I used to do this all the time when I was a kid … drawing out my dream house or the house of the made up family I was writing a story about.

The first sketch is the simplest solution – cut off 1/3 of my 11’x10′ office to create a hallway and add two modest size bedrooms with closets. My office could even be further cut down to say … 6’x6′ to create a playroom area or a reading nook or something. Total addition: approx. 300 sq. ft.

The second sketch takes the same idea but shoves it further from the existing house to create a den or study area and possibly an enclosed outdoor courtyard area off of the master bedroom. An enclosed outdoor living space is a little fantasy of ours. Total addition: approx: 500 sq. ft.

I showed Jason my sketches and he loves the second one. Sweet! Let’s do it! Oh wait, we don’t have kids. We don’t have $50,000 lying around. That’s OK. For now, I’ll just map these out in Illustrator.

What do you think? Do you have experience with adding on to your home? Would our house lose it’s ranchiness if we had an addition that made it L-shaped (or gun shaped)? We don’t have room on our property to expand on either side. This box I added on the tax assessment schematic shows it would be about 26’x20′ for the larger of the 2 addition plans:

I wonder how much these plans will change in the next … oh … 7 years or so.

5 Comments | Art, Art: graphic design, Art: interior design, Art: mid-century design, Art: modern design | Tagged: addition, floor plan, floorplan | Permalink
Posted by mahlbrandt

More Gold Cortez and Corning Ware

07/29/2010

At a recent estate sale we found some more Gold Cortez dishes. I don’t even really like this pattern that much but it’s just funny that we keep seeing 1 or 2 pieces everywhere we go so we keep collecting it.

We also found this Corning Ware casserole dish. It’s a good size and has a lid. I took this photo before Jason cleaned 50 years of burned grease off of it. This is definitely one of my favorite Corning Ware patterns with the yellow and blue flowers. Not sure of the name.

Leave a Comment » | Art, Art: mcm thrift store find, Art: mid-century design | Tagged: corning ware, estate sale, gold cortez | Permalink
Posted by mahlbrandt

Pressed flowers, mushrooms and an owl

07/26/2010

At a recent estate sale Jason and I hit the jackpot of small* framed mid-century art. I found the one of the pressed botanical collages on blue linen and the owl carving on gold burlap in one room while Jason found the other flower collage and mushroom paintings in another room—two white on black paper and one color on wood block.

*the blue pressed flower collages are around 6″ square.

As we were walking toward the checkout together I told said to him, “I’m so glad we like the same things.”

Maybe a little kitschy and I have no idea where we’re going to put them but for $4 total we couldn’t resist.

(Bad photos … sorry. There are more details in these than you can see here.)

This owl carving is both of our favorite. Someday it will probably live next to the owls we got in May.

1 Comment | Art, Art: crafts, Art: mcm thrift store find, Art: mid-century design | Tagged: Art, estate sale, mid-century | Permalink
Posted by mahlbrandt

Pretty Coasters

07/21/2010

While we were in Miami Beach we decided to check out a thrift store that had some good reviews, called SoBe Thrift. I’m thankful we didn’t find anything big because we were a mile from our vehicle. We picked up these two coasters with a funky mid-century pattern on them. We have one at home that we found at a Nashville thrift store. I haven’t investigated to find out the brand of these yet but they remind me a bit of our Franciscan Pottery/Gladding, McBean & Co starburst platter.

I love a cup of tea, especially if it’s in a pretty tea cup. The saucers look great with these blue tea cups.

Sorry for my lack of posting earlier this week. I don’t have any exciting excuse, I just got busy and decided sleeping was more important that blog posting. 🙂

4 Comments | Art, Art: mcm thrift store find, Art: mid-century design | Tagged: coasters, Miami, thrift store | Permalink
Posted by mahlbrandt

Miami Beach Art Deco

07/15/2010

Art Deco, the modern art and architecture movement of the 1930s and 40s, was the launching pad for mid-century modern design. I don’t know if I would have been able to describe art deco two weeks about but after a day spend in Miami Beach, I have a much better understanding of and appreciation for the style. Pastel colors, rounded corners, geometric shapes, modern angles, neon. I’ll let the photographs speak for themselves.

1 Comment | Art, Art: mid-century design, Art: modern design | Tagged: art deco, Miami, miami beach | Permalink
Posted by mahlbrandt

Great Grandpa Carl

07/14/2010

The reason we went to Naples for vacation is because Jason has such fond memories of a vacation his family took when he was 7 years old to visit his great-grandfather Carl Ludwig Ahlbrandt.

From his obituary: “Mr. Ahlbrandt was president of the Carpenters Union Local 1641 from 1968 to 1975. He also has the honor of becoming the director of apprenticeship, State of Florida, Division of Labor, Bureau of Apprenticeship. He and his students built the Carl Ahlbrandt Building of the local carpenters apprenticeship school on Enterprise Avenue in Naples. It was designated as the last school built in the United States by an instructor and his students.”

Here’s their mint green ranch the way Jason remembered it circa 1989:

There was a lime tree and a mango tree to the right of the house and pineapples growing on the left side. Coconut and palm trees lined the property. The house was a 0.5 mile walk to the beach. We put his address in the GPS and found the empty lot where his house once stood. It was sad to see it gone.

Jason spent a lot of time walking around the yard remembering. Mourning the house a little bit. The lot is for sale so we called to inquire about it. Way out of reach. But we can dream … Maybe someday we’ll buy up that lot and rebuild a mid-century modern home here.

The mango tree was nothing but a stump in the ground but the unkempt lime tree was still here. Jason picked the one and only lime off of it and took it with him.

Naples still has a large majority of it’s original mid-century homes. That makes it even harder to see that this one is gone.

As an artist, entrepreneur, gardener and go-getter, Jason feels a special connection to his great-grandfather. For me, it was a neat experience to get to know Carl a little bit through photographs and stories and by walking around his former yard.

We tried with no avail to find the building that was named after Carl. Apparently, there are several buildings around Naples and Marco Island that he built or helped build but we didn’t have a list of those addresses. Next trip. Next time.

5 Comments | Art, Art: mid-century design, Family, Family: Extended Family and Friends, Family: Jason | Tagged: Carl Ahlbrandt, Carl L. Ahlbrandt, Carl Ludwig Ahlbrandt, Florida, Naples | Permalink
Posted by mahlbrandt

Naples, Florida: Mid-Century Modern

07/13/2010

Naples has a lot of mid-century modern architecture: lots of peach and turquoise ranch homes with concrete block, flat or slow slung roofs. There was even an A-frame walk-up Dairy Queen. But … I did a lousy job documenting all of that. I was too busy looking out the windows and taking it all in. And leaving my camera and cell phone at the hotel for fear of sand somehow working it’s way into my precious electronics. Sorry. I did take a few mediocre pictures. Next time I’ll do a better job of documenting the neighborhoods.