Word: newports
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...McDonald's. He is learning the "langwich," he tells Danny. The sweet, agoraphobic Michael, Lauren's brother, a caretaker for an oil rig, trades commodities from his darkened, video-wired beach house (as cozy, Danny says, as the inside of a digital watch). Finally, there are Jane Holt, Newport Beach's first female police chief, who believes she can find safety in life if she can achieve order, and her old-fashioned partner, who knows the folly of that hope...
...June's auction of the most expensive piece of furniture ever sold: a $12.1 million desk. The mahogany masterpiece was no curlicued Versailles settee or crested English bureau. It was a stately secretary of distinctly American block-and-shell design, crafted in 1760 by the Goddard-Townsend cabinetmakers of Newport, R.I. "For years, Europeans have given us an inferiority complex," says furniture dealer Harold Sack, 78, who bought the desk for an anonymous client, believed to be Texas billionaire Robert Bass. "To finally see American furniture taken as an important art form is enormously gratifying...
...giddy escalation in prices is due in part to scarcity, since pre- Revolutionary furniture is as sparse as its spare Yankee lines. The rarest pieces were handcrafted in the port cities of Philadelphia, Newport, Boston, Salem, Mass., and Portsmouth, Va., where rich patrons financed local artisans. These wealthy merchants, hoping to create heirlooms for their families, combed the Caribbean for the finest, oldest mahogany trees. The wood they found was dense and close-grained, unlike the spongy grain of the younger, forced-growth trees that are planted today. "All the great wood was used up in the 18th century," maintains...
Less wealthy furniture buyers have developed a fancy for Early American pieces as well, which has spurred a market for machine-made reproductions. Since the sale of the Newport desk, Kindel Furniture of Grand Rapids has booked orders for 110 replicas at $19,000 each. Buyers who prefer the real thing can choose pieces from a second tier of expertly designed antiques selling...