Artist Chairs

While we were vacationing in Saugatuck last week we headed over to Douglas since we hadn’t checked it out last year. I was excited when we found a map of the town on a kiosk that featured artist decorated Adirondack Chairs but as we looked around we realized that there were no chairs. We finally found a school housed themed one “School House Days” by Judy Anthrop behind the old school house.

It turned out that the rest of the chairs had just been auctioned off and gone to their new homes. A shopkeeper told us that the one that was in front of her store was now on a porch a few streets over. These regular size chairs seem a lot more conducive to house placement than the oversized Adirondack Chairs I saw in Wilmington, Vermont several years ago (see post In blank they do blank).

And maybe more conducive to eventual use than the ones from my favorite artist chair fundraiser – the one we did at Nonotuck when we first moved to the Feiker school. The old elementary school had a bunch of beautiful old wooden children’s chairs and since we weren’t going to use them in the classrooms we got permission from the city (our landlord) to sell them. We had a lot of parent artists and artist friends who were excited to participate. I was lucky enough to “win” the bid on the chair by parent Melissa Barillaro’s artist brother (Joe?).

The chair sat at the top of our stairs in Northampton and I wondered where it would work in Chicago but we found the perfect place for it. One of the oddities of our new condo was a small closet space with no door. The former owners had used it as a display area for small glass animals and had installed a heavy glass shelf. After we removed the glass shelf we realized that the closet was the perfect place to put our Levy/Laroque coat rack. At first I thought I would put the small yellow chest of drawers that used to sit by my bed under it but it was too tall and then I realized the chair would be perfect.

I imagined it would be a place to sit on to put on and take off shoes but it has become more like a little table with extra hanging space. Since there is an outlet behind it, it first became a phone and iPad charging station. Then my husband started putting his keys and sunglasses on it and I realized it was a perfect place to hang bags.

In this photo you can see one of the charging cords trailing onto the floor. A blogger I was reading the other day said the difference between photos of a home in a blog and the photos in a magazine shoot is that blog photos show the stuff one actually has on their bedside tables. So rather than retaking this photo I’m going to go with that!