Tanker Desks - take two

Greetings and happy 2012! This new year finds me in a new home in Brooklyn, currently on the hunt for a work desk, which will hopefully aid in motivating me to update this site a little more frequently! (Ha.) While hunting around Craigslist and assorted other internet treasure troves for some sort of an affordable vintage office desk ("affordable"? Ha again.), I remembered a post about retro furniture I'd made ages ago on this very site. While I still am unable to afford to spend $700 on a desk, I can at least share the assorted other resources for vintage desks I've found, and maybe you'll be lucky enough to both have the cash and live near enough to the seller to score one.

Past, Present Future
This online retailer out of Minneapolis has an incredibly huge collection of mid-century furniture, as well as what appear to be some new pieces crafted in a solid vintage style and made to your specifications. Tanker desks, club chairs, sofas, book shelves, and even clocks and staplers.

For a few hundred bucks, you can have these vintage pieces restored in a basic manner. For double your money you can secure a custom restoration job, with a huge assortment of powder coat finishes, fabrics and linoleum choices (depending on what item you are having redone). Also, if you are planning on making your own wanna-be period televisions series of Mad Men, you can talk to them about prop rental furniture for your sets. If I lived anywhere even remotely close to Minneapolis, I'd be in their showroom browsing around instead of writing a blog about tables I can't afford!

Oh, and the other thing I love about Past Present Future's site is that they happen to have a ton of images from old product catalogs for some of these pieces. You know I love me some vintage product ads. For more, check out their "tables" section, and look at the bottom two rows of thumbnails.

Etsy
I hardly EVER go to Etsy. Don't ask me why. I even have a store (with nothing in it, apparently!) and still hardly bother to wade through the masses of handmade craft projects and overpriced vintage clothing. BUT I somehow was directed over there while Google searching "tanker desk" and lo and behold...people sell furniture there!

Ebay
I know many people have had success buying vintage cars and parts on Ebay, and I assume buying some huge vintage office desk would be about the same. Of course, as always, shipping these things is a bitch, so you are best off searching in your particular area and picking it up yourself. I didn't have much luck, but since I'm always wasting time browsing that dame site, I might as well continue to keep my eyes peeled.

Craigslist
You know...there's always this.

From Tiki Townhouse to Mid-Century Mansion

While cruising around the web for some good images of vintage wallpaper, I ended up on the Apartment Therapy blog, an interior design blog I happen to be familiar with on several levels already (they frequently mention the company I work for and used an image I'd taken at the semi-annual Brimfield Antiques Show in Massachusetts for a post they wrote on the fair and all the amazing junk therein).

The Apartment Therapy post I was honing in on through my search was about two people who I now am insanely jealous of - David "Duke" and Amy Carter - former Chicago residents of McKinley Park and proprietors of Pegboard Modern (a mid-century modern furniture showroom). Their old two bedroom apartment featured in the interview from 2007 is quite possibly the mid-century dwelling of my psychotic retro dreams.


David & Amy's living room (all photos taken by David & Amy)


An assortment of interior photos, mostly of their immense tiki collection.

From these few photos (there's more in a slide show on the Apartment Therapy site), you can tell they created an urban shrine to their retro religion. Not surprisingly, they also wrote a book on their collecting habits, Tiki Quest: Collecting the Exotic Past, documenting their tiki obsession in full four-color glory.

As I continued to look for more info on this admirable design duo, I found another feature on their abode, this one from April of 2009 on the Strange Closets website. By now they have moved to quaint Munster, Indiana with their son and have filled an entire cruciform (that means shaped like an X, basically; four square rooms that intersect in the middle), mid-century modern house with their fab furnishings.




(Photos by Tate Gunnerson from Strange Closets)


Seeing all this stuff makes me excited to finally have a place of my own one day (which is coming soon enough). Having lived with roommates for the majority of my life has made it difficult for me to have full control of the interior designing of my residency, which can be a super huge bummer if you are as emotionally conjoined to your surroundings as I am. It can also be a blessing, because god knows if I'd been living in a house I didn't have to move out of for the last ten years, I would have amassed a wealth of junk courtesy of my antiquing addiction. At least living in expensive, cramped apartments in New York that I have to move out of every two years or so has tamped down my hoarding of vintage knickknacks. For now.

The Carter house also makes me wonder what I must be like for a kid like theirs to grow up in a house like that. My parents never really had any collecting habits, outside of my Dad's brief obsession with Happy Meal toys when we were kids, when he insisted one day they'd be worth "something". (I hope they've all been sacrificed to the yard sale gods over the years.) I firmly believe that this has something to do with the fact that both of their parents had some particular obsessions of their own: my Dad's mother decorated the house with early American antiquities - horse hair couches, marble claw-foot tables, electrified gas lamps - and my Mom's Dad was a photographer, obsessed with cameras, musical instruments and vintage radios, and set aside his entire basement for tinkering and storage of his techno ephemera.

Once, when I came home during high school with a carload of beautiful vintage "junk" (Dad's words) I'd scored that day at an auction, I was excitedly having show-and-tell with Dad, who was making lunch in the kitchen. When it became clear to me he was feigning interest in my score, I confronted his apathy. "Look, Katie. I grew up in a house filled with antiques. It smelled like old people, the couches were uncomfortable, I wasn't allowed to touch anything. I thought it was completely stupid. Why fill your home with old, breakable things when it makes it impossible to live in?? I wish I could share your enthusiasm for "antiques" but I just can't. They make plenty of good dishes and tables nowadays. And if you break them, no big deal."

My Dad works with computers. Not much of a surprise, I guess.

At any rate, I look forward to my residential future, and to one day have a place that serves as both a gallery and an meticulously designed, comfortable living space...but one I can still hula hoop in without fear of ruining anything.

TOOLS OF THE TRADE

Nope, I'm not talking about socket sets and voltage meters, I'm talking about the two essentials of almost any given job: something to write with and a place to sit. Granted, I've had a few jobs where the only place I had to sit was on a bale of hay or in a dark closet where I could have some quiet time, but ultimately I've always needed somewhere to call home base.


My glorious current office desk - two file cabinets and a piece of laminated MDF board

In a perfect world where the economy wasn't being ravaged like a vat of gummy worms in a candy store full of fat kids, I'd be able to demand that I have a desk that shares the equivalence of my beauty, charm and talent, not one made from "whatever was lying around". And if that were reality (the part where I get whatever desk I want), I'd be heading over to Retro Office, a company from Santa Fe Springs, CA, who specializes in selling all manner of salvaged, restored vintage warehouse office furniture. Credenzas, archival map flat files, old waste baskets and the crown gem of them all, their tanker desks.


Dear god, will you look at that thing?? I could have a side extention and a pencil drawer!!

The design, the durability...oh my god, and they have over 40 different colors you can customize your furniture in, including auto metal flake (you can even get a two-tone paint job so the desk in your shop matches exactly the paint scheme on your car or bike) or original manufacturers colors. They also have several selections of desktop material (including glass, for local deliveries only) AND if you order any kind of steel chair that needs upholstering, they have a vast selection of fabrics to choose from or you can send in your own. Eeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!! *head explodes*

Now that we've got the whole desk part of this equation squared away, let's move on to our writing utensils of choice - pencils!! In true homage to the fact that "they don't make 'em like they used to", Bob Truby's Brand Name Pencils is one of the most curious - and well designed! - sites I've stumbled upon in the last few months. It's an OCD pencil-nerd's virtual wet dream, showcasing 142 different brands of pencils and sorted not only by brand but by several characteristics as well, such as "copying pencils" "over-sized ferrule".

My personal favorites (yes, I nerded out that hard core about pencils):

Bob even goes so far as to include little tibits of information about each manufacturer, which satisfies the useless-knowledge junkie in me to no end. For example, did you know that the Ozark Pencil Co., founded in 1911, also claimed to be the leading manufacturer in not only pencils but enamel whistles?? Who knew!?

Hours of fun, to say the least. Hmm...now I just need to send Bob an email so he can answer my one remaining question..."Can I see your pencil box??"