Mitchell Owens

Oct 28, 2024 | themagazineantiques.com | Mitchell Owens

If there was a contest for the most dynamic moment in Western history—when art, architecture, design, tourism, science, collecting, taste, and worldly temptations suddenly synchronized—Michael Thomas’s bet would be on the mid- to late eighteenth century, specifically in the linked kingdoms of Naples and Sicily, a period and a place so ferociously fecund that the scholar compares its influence to the invention of the Internet.

Oct 25, 2024 | themagazineantiques.com | Mitchell Owens

On the evening of April 4, 1913, Manhattan’s fashionable set crowded into the grand ballroom of the Plaza Hotel. Though the audience wore evening dress, no society dance was taking place. No formal candlelit dinner, either, and no debutante’s graceful curtsy amid a stage-set garden of American Beauty roses hemmed by boxwood hedges.

Oct 21, 2024 | worldofinteriors.com | Mitchell Owens

Once upon a time there was a house. A white house. A very, very white house that also happened to be a very contemporary house, Brutalist even, with raw concrete on the outside and pearly plaster on the inside, and with so much glass involved that it could have been a lantern. The furniture was white, too: that blameless Eero Saarinen table, flaring from the pale-grey marble floor like a tulip, and its matching chairs. There was a round white bed also, a pure platform as spotless as a cloud.

Oct 11, 2024 | architecturaldigest.com | Mitchell Owens

In 1791, George Washington reputedly attended some sort of gathering in the sunny 17-by-30-foot ballroom that is now Aldous Bertram’s Charleston apartment. Then again, perhaps not. “I’m rather in love with that fact, but it’s not exactly a fact,” the tall and sprightly British-born decorator, artist, and author gingerly allows.

Sep 30, 2024 | themagazineantiques.com | Mitchell Owens

Antiques have been part of my life since day one,” the British architect and decorator Ben Pentreath told me when the subject came up in a recent conversation. Ditto: I was brought up amid objects from the past, too. Truthfully, they were nothing special—golden oak furnishings and other such commonplaces made at the end of the nineteenth century and sold through mail-order catalogues—but their presence meant that my brother and I were always surrounded by stories, either known or implied.