Rabbit Holes, Safe Spaces and Future Doors to Narnia

1. A Parisian apartment frozen in time with floor to ceiling cinema posters. Inside the 400m2 home of a French doctor who was crazy about cinema. His walls that tell a lifetime of passion for cinema, every room is an archive, every wall a memory, Discovered

It’s taken many names, shapes and forms over the centuries – the conversation chair, the courting bench, a tête-à-tête, a chaperone chair, the vis-à-vis, gossip chair or the indiscret. Considered the pinnacle of sophistication and style during the Gilded and Victorian age, if you were entertaining the fashionable elite, one simply wasn’t running a home worth visiting without a conversation chair in one’s parlour.

A real literary club in Paris that inspired a lifestyle collection with Figaret© (circa 1968). at Messy Nessy's Cabinet Shop the Collection.

Before books were easily printed and accessible to nearly everyone, before they even took the form of books specifically, there was a different story. Information was scarce in its written form, and so scribes and scholars developed a meticulous system for organizing libraries of tablets. That’s right: the oldest known form of organizing books predates the books themselves. We have, of course, come a long way since then. Depending on your age, you might remember the tiny envelope with the stamp card in the back of your library book. That, friends, is a remnant of the Dewey Decimal System, a relic of the card catalog used in libraries for 200 years. In the age of the internet, one would think that the obsolete card catalogs have disappeared, but true to form, collectors dedicated to organizing written volumes have turned to collecting the organisation forms themselves.

A band of adolescent music-lovers, swing dancers and snappy dressers– not exactly the type you’d expect to take on the Nazi Hitler Youth. But in pre-WWII Germany, the Nazi regimentation of society inadvertantly gave rise to massive teenage street gangs who beat up the Hitler Youth, tagged anti-Nazi graffiti at train stations– and listened to jazz.

It's the biggest show on earth– literally. No theatre is big enough for the troupe that transforms entire towns and cities into its stage.

It was a pretty epic Round Table, albeit one held in vain. Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, Yves-Saint Laurent and other creative power-houses had joined forces with one impossible goal: to save Sergei Parajanov.

What shall we keep a keen eye out for at our next expedition to the flea market? Tramp Art! No I haven’t just insulted you, I’m talking about the little-known and often misunderstood branch of outsider art; curiously whittled wood works intricately carved from discarded cigar boxes – that’s right, cigar boxes. This humble and charming craft flourished in the second half of the 19th century in Europe and America until it became a lost art around the same time as the Great Depression and the outbreak of World War II. It was an art of the people, made by working class men, women and sometimes even children, across a diverse range of ethnic groups. The artists, the majority of which will likely remain forgotten, were factory workers, farmers, soldiers, builders, bakers. Tramp art seemed to thrive wherever scrap wood was readily available and manual labor was a required skill, not to mention, a great deal of patience.

Because sometimes, bread deserves its own altar. This tiny vintage pillbox containing an epiphany cake charm in the form of a baguette with a tiny candle and ex-voto imagery.  This little keepsake is part curiosity, part art object, part ode to French culture. Each shrine is handmade by Nessy.

When you were young, what did you want to be? An astronaut, a princess, maybe a superhero or president of the world. Mike Stevens dreamt of being a soul super star, he wanted to tour the world, to write and produce award-winning albums and run his own record label. He would star in, write and direct his own films. People would flock to see this titan of soul, fans adored him, people wanted to be him. Think James Brown meets Quincy Jones. And between 1968 and 1977 Mike would achieve all of this, only he’d do it all with his own wondrous imagination.