June 8, 2025

Welcome back to Wall Power. I’m Marion Maneker. It’s design week at the auction houses, and tonight Julie Davich takes a look at what’s on offer—which runs the gamut from big names like Tiffany studios, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Alberto Giacometti to François-Xavier Lalanne and Jean-Michel Frank. The design category is attracting more and more interest in a wider range of objects, like ceramics, but most of these artists have their own accelerating markets separate from design as well. Once again, and not to sound like too much of a bore, if you’re reading a pirated copy of this newsletter forwarded by a friend, do the right thing—sign up for your own subscription. (I’ll thank you for it later, I promise.)

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Now, let’s get started…

Julie Brener Davich

Watch This

This week’s Important Watches sale at Sotheby’s will be the fourth that Geoff Hess, the auction house’s global head of watches, has overseen in New York in his almost two years on the job. “This is the best assortment of watches I’ve ever seen in one sale,” said Hess, a longtime watch collector who has worked in the field for a decade. “It feels like a career moment.” Tuesday’s sale features a curated selection of 113 lots, including the two most expensive watches of the season. Estimated at $3 million, Patek Philippe’s Reference 2499 ‘Second Series’ is one of the most significant watches in history—“the holy grail,” Sotheby’s V.P. Vincent Brasesco told me. It’s not only one of the most complicated watches ever made, but this particular example, from 1957, is one of only nine pink gold versions, and the only one double-signed by the retailer, Gobbi Milano, making it “one-of-one” in Brasesco’s words. It also happens to be in museum-grade condition. The last time it sold at Sotheby’s Hong Kong, in April 2022, it made $7.7 million. The next-most-expensive lot, estimated at $1.25 million, is a pink gold Patek Philippe minute repeater, from 1954. Stamped by the retailer, Gübelin, it is also one-of-one, and in immaculate condition. It was last sold at Antiquorum in 1989 in the Patek Philippe 150th anniversary auction. Minute repeaters, which were created for the visually impaired, announce the time by chiming different tones for the hours, quarter hours, and minutes. There are six in this sale, all by Patek Philippe. (Sotheby’s hired a composer to create a two-minute pop song using the different chimes of all the watches, and made a music video to go with it.) Of course, celebrity watches have a different kind of appeal—less about horology, more about lore—and in this sale, Sotheby’s is offering Al Capone’s Patek Philippe pocket watch, circa 1919. Capone purchased it new, threw away its original gold case, and replaced it with a custom platinum case encrusted with his diamond monogram, making it far less valuable. It’s also missing the minute hand (no, they don’t know what happened to it). The consignor bought it for $229,000 at an auction of Capone’s belongings at the Nevada-based Witherell auction house in October 2021. Sotheby’s has estimated it at $80,000.

Now, for the main event…

Design of the Times

This week’s design auctions in New York are a mix of masterpieces by Lalanne, Giacometti, and Tiffany, and interesting works by up-and-coming designers, reflecting a desire for the unique among today’s discerning collectors.

Julie Brener Davich

A curious thing happened at Wright’s design sales in Chicago last week. The design library of James Zemaitis, a former Phillips and Sotheby’s design specialist who now works at R & Company, crushed estimates. A group of 17 books on French art deco estimated at $600 went for $13,970; a selection of 11 George Nakashima monographs estimated at $500 went for $17,780. The sale carried on like that for multiple lots, a reflection of the discerning nature of buyers in the current market, whose interest in design extends beyond bookshelves to what goes on them. At the design auctions in New York this week, a market insider told me we can expect a mix of stellar results for the best lots, but also a relatively high percentage of unsold works, which speaks to buyers’ willingness to shell out for only the best and rarest objects. But the real talk of the season is Christie’s sale on Thursday, featuring furniture and lighting from the historic James D. Zellerbach mansion in Pacific Heights, San Francisco, by the pioneering interior designer Frances Elkins. “From a collectors’ point of view, this is a rare and interesting sale,” an influential person in the design world wrote to me of the relatively small offering of 36 prewar modernist lots. The sale is filled with treasures by Alberto Giacometti, interior designer Jean-Michel Frank, and Elkins, a talented furniture designer. “Frank was her collaborator and friend,” Christie’s specialist Victoria Tudor told me. “She brought him and his modernist sensibility to America.”

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Elkins has some market momentum, herself. This past February, Wright set a world auction record for one of her designs when a mirror sold for $28,000 against an estimate of $4,000. On Thursday, Christie’s is offering eight of her designs for estimates ranging from $4,000 to $30,000. As we know, the art world loves a rediscovery. Other highlights from the Zellerbach sale include a Frank Aragon low table in cerused oak, estimated at $400,000, and a pair of rare Giacometti Pyramides andirons, estimated at $300,000. “They feel very Grand Tour,” said Tudor. Of course, the top lots are two plaster albatrosses by Giacometti, estimated at $2 million each. They are site-specific creations for the alcoves framing the Zellerbachs’ front door, and the only known curved versions of these iconic sculptures, with a dynamism the flat versions do not possess. Christie’s worked with a fabricator to create custom mounts, allowing the sculptures to be installed on a flat surface. (When two identical lots come up sequentially, there’s no telling which one will do better.) In 2022, Christie’s sold a flat version from the collection of Hubert de Givenchy for €4.2 million, against an estimate of €200,000.

Alberto Giacometti, Important and Rare 'Oiseau',

Alberto Giacometti, Oiseau, Curved Version, circa 1937. Photo: Flying Studio

Christie’s 96-lot various-owners sale is heavy on French design, including a selection of Dalpayrat ceramics. There’s also a smattering of American, Brazilian, and Scandinavian design. Don’t miss the 1948 Snowflake chandelier from Finnish designer Paavo Tynell’s Fantasia series, circa 1948, carrying an estimate of $200,000.

Window Dressing

Both Christie’s and Sotheby’s have Tiffany windows this season—which is not surprising, since the Danner Memorial Window set a world auction record for Tiffany this past November at Sotheby’s, when it sold for $12.5 million, almost four times the previous record. Christie’s has a three-panel Tiffany memorial window consigned by a church in East Greenwich, Rhode Island, estimated at $2 million, though this might be a tough sell given the psalm and the name of the memorialized, William Goddard, running along the bottom. Sotheby’s window is a taller, single-panel version, estimated at $1.5 million. (Unusually, it has clear glass in the center, which allows it to be used functionally as a regular window, thereby increasing the value.) It comes to auction from the home of Ann and Robert Fromer, in Kings Point on the Long Island Sound.

Sotheby’s window is being offered in a dedicated Tiffany session with 54 other lots spanning the studio’s varied output, from lamps to pottery to “fancy goods” like a desk set, scent bottle, and inkstand. More than half of the lots also come from the Fromers’ collection. There’s a wide selection of lamps, including a poinsettia floor lamp, estimated at $350,000, and an unusual early table lamp with a peacock-decorated glass base, estimated at $90,000.

The $3 Million Lalanne

Sotheby’s 141-lot various-owners sale is led by an early Rhinoceros bar by François-Xavier Lalanne with an unusually warm-toned patina, estimated at $3 million. There’s also a varied selection of five Frank Lloyd Wright designs coming in hot on the heels of one of his lamps making $7.5 million in Sotheby’s modern evening sale last month. More than one-third of the lots in the current sale come from one New York collection, including a set of four Puff armchairs by Giancarlo Valle that are estimated at $7,000. Across town, Phillips is offering the first Smile sofa that Valle ever made, in 2017, for $6,000. His last few works that came up at auction sold for multiples of their estimates. “He’s really hot right now,” Phillips associate specialist Ben Green, told me. (If you’d like to know more about Valle, see my Gallery Hopping column from a couple weeks ago.)

Judy Kensley McKie, Fish bench (1999). Photo: Courtesy of Phillips

All 24 pieces in Sotheby’s stand-alone sale of ceramics by Axel Salto come from the same New York collection, but I was told by a veteran of the design market that they are only “B+” and lacking the kind of “power examples” that one would expect based on the amount of marketing Sotheby’s has put behind the sale. But the Phillips sale is up first, on Tuesday, with 85 lots comprising a visual mix of French, American, and Italian design. Carrying an estimate of $200,000, a Diego Giacometti Berceau low table, from the collection of Mary and John Pappajohn, is the top lot of the sale. A Fish bench in patinated bronze by Judy McKie is estimated at $150,000. The last time one of these came up for sale, at Rago in December 2023, it sold for $327,600 (that one was black; this one is blue). In fact, the top lot at Wright’s sale last week was a McKie Dragon table in glass and patinated bronze that sold for $152,400 against an estimate of $40,000. “Her career has skyrocketed,” Green said.

Thanks, Julie. That’s all for this Sunday. See you on Tuesday, M

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