Who Likes Thonet Chairs? (And My Varda Affair Continues)

Well, I like Thonet chairs, very much indeed. And so did Howard Carter, discoverer of the tomb of King Tutankhamun:



And so did Cléo from Cléo de 5 à 7:



As long as we're there, can we please talk about this apartment? In what appears to be a celestial hayloft suspended somewhere over Paris, Cléo the troubled chanteuse lives. Light everything, yet miraculously the beautiful visual-weight of the beams remains. Remember, this room is from 1962; how fresh and utterly contemporary.

But! All of the furniture is black black black. I love the contrast: the furnishings sit in space like objects, and the room becomes a stage for the actions of its inhabitants. I could never live this way (I like having rooms that talk back, if you know what I mean, rather than recede), but it is an utterly perfect backdrop for the peripatetic Cléo. Here she is in a rare still moment:



Look at the columns on the bed! Nuts. All of the furnishings in the room are antiques (and, I suspect in 1962, on the vanguard of taste -- like buying Paul Evans in the early 90s), but are used in so fresh a way.

I'd stay there a few days, but suspect that even in that short time I'd manage to collect enough junk at the flea markets to sully its purity.