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Auctions | Jun 27, 2016 |
Four Seasons restaurant closes, items to debut in Wright auction
Boh staff
By Staff

A landmark sale will take place in the interior of New York’s landmarked Seagram Building on July 26. Wright’s special sale, showcasing furniture, decorative objects and tableware from The Four Seasons Restaurant, will number about 500 lots, replete with work by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Hans Wegner, in addition to custom pieces by Philip Johnson and Knoll furniture. Opened in 1959, the Philip Johnson-designed restaurant will close on July 16, with plans to move to a new location.

Among the offerings: a pair of Brno armchairs, a custom Tulip table and Tulip chairs, a pair of barstools from The Grill Room, stemware and a caviar bowl designed by Garth and Ada Louise Huxtable, and a collection of Four Seasons plates.

Pulitzer Prize-winning architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote of the restaurant’s legacy, “Johnson set out to prove that modernism was capable of producing a room that would be the equal in grandeur of such great New York establishments as, say, Henry Hardenbergh’s Oak Room at The Plaza hotel and Charles McKim’s main dining room at the The University Club: places in which there was not only uplifting space, but a sense that everything, from the architecture to the furniture to the tableware, came together to create a unified and beautiful whole.”

As Graydon Carter reflects on the space in the Wright catalogue, “The Four Seasons was, in the language of Las Vegas, ‘The Big Room,’ and it will be a very different animal going forward. The restaurant came into this world almost a decade before the Concorde—another marvel of clean line and love of the future—and outlasted it by a decade. For more than half a century, The Four Seasons was a shimmering miracle of light, murmur and quiet power. And now it’s gone and the void will be felt.”

Wright is publishing a special catalog of the auction, which can be purchased here. The full contents of the sale will be posted online in early July.

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