Frank Lloyd Wright

Wright Studies

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Treasured Hunting
LA Times, June 19, 1991, by Elizabeth Venant

http://articles.latimes.com/1991-06-19/news/vw-794_1_junk-shop

Excerpts:

Collecting: In 24 years, Jim and Janeen Marrin amassed a fortune in Arts and Crafts furniture and decorative objects by scouring swap meets and junk shops.

In 24 years of marriage, she and her husband, Jim, have amassed one of the country's premiere collections of Arts and Crafts furniture and decorative objects. Their vintage bungalow near Los Angeles is a curator's dream setting of works for the functional early 20-Century designs which are the American outgrowth of the earlier English movement. Works of the period's most illustrious designers furnish the house: Gustav Stickley tables and settles, Frank Lloyd Wright chairs, Greene & Greene windows and Dirk van Erp lamps.

In picking up the castoffs, the pair inadvertently achieved the sort of serious status in the art world that intensely upwardly mobile collectors crave. Today, their collection is worth millions of dollars and luminaries from Steven Spielberg to Domino's Pizza magnate Thomas Monaghan vie for equivalent pieces at auction.

"It's one of the seminal collections of Arts and Crafts in the United States," says Nancy McClelland, director of 19th- and 20th-Century decorative arts at Christie's in New York, who has organized semiannual period auctions since 1982. "They've put it together brilliantly. They understand what it is they've collected. They both have great eyes."

All of the Wright silverware, except a creamer owned by his widow, was thought to have been melted down during World War II--that is, until nine years ago, when Jim Marrin discovered their set, unscathed and intact, at the Long Beach swap meet. Priced at $125, the service was gratefully sold for an even $100. It had been sitting in the dealer's antique shop in Riverside for years.

"I was jumping up and down," Jim recalls in a telephone interview from Switzerland, telling how he first saw the IH monogram, then the manufacturer's name, Fujino & Co., Tokyo, on the bottom of the creamer. After confirming the service's authenticity in a reference book, he says, "I started screaming and laughing and going crazy."

The Marrins have not had the set appraised, although McClelland enthuses that if it ever came up for sale that "would be wonderful." Meanwhile, Tiffany's sells a three-piece silver reproduction--which differs in details, the Marrins say--for $9,500.

For their part, the couple has used the set on special occasions. "We wouldn't want it if we couldn't use it," Janeen Marrin says of her furnishings. After all, furniture was what it was meant to be at the start.

WHOLE ARTICLE

Collecting: In 24 years, Jim and Janeen Marrin amassed a fortune in Arts and Crafts furniture and decorative objects by scouring swap meets and junk shops.

The sky is dark, the freeways are empty, and the birds are still yawning in their nests.

But for a swap-meet aficionado such as Janeen Marrin, it is an hour to be as alert as a general preparing for combat.

From the entrance of the Rose Bowl, where 1,500 vendors gather to sell their wares one Sunday a month, Marrin surveys her field of action. A snaking cavalcade of vans, headlights still glowing, is pulling into the vast parking lots; merchants are setting up rows of stalls, snapping open tables, rolling out display mats.

At the stroke of 6 a.m., Marrin, along with other early birds, will march into the hubbub. For the next five hours, she and her two daughters will ply the rows of merchandise with a military determination. There is no warming cup of coffee to send her off. She will not stop for food or rest.

For this bohemian-looking woman, wearing a bright smock and a large Indian cross, is a connoisseur of swap meets, a nationally celebrated queen of "junking."

More than two dozen major pieces and thousands of lesser items were all ferreted out of piles of dusty, broken discards found at Southern California swap meets and thrift shops, with few costing more than $100. Rummaging on the $12,000 a year Jim Marrin earned as a graphic artist, the couple put together the bulk of their collection during the decade after their 1966 marriage.

"At that time, most antique dealers really looked down on this stuff," says Janeen Marrin. "It was like, 'Uhhhhh, I won't even handle it.' "

For the past year and a half, however, each of the Marrins has been searching out great designs alone. With their reputations established, their home bulging with treasures, their two daughters raised, they have separated--Janeen staying in the house and Jim teaching in Switzerland for the summer.

The collection, which has been held together by their devotion, could now be splintered and sold. And the thrill of collecting could be replaced by bickering over the realities of hard cash and conditions of sale.

For this Sunday morning, however, Marrin and her daughters, Erica, 20, and Emily, 23--both junking buffs--work the swap meet just as they always have, happily, expertly and on a shoestring budget.

"There's no better person to go to a swap meet with," affirms Randy Makinson, director of the Gamble House in Pasadena, considered one of Greene & Greene's finest examples of architecture. "To watch her move through the thing is to see this keen sense of design. She doesn't have to look to see if a piece has a signature or not."

Marrin puts it more simply. "Basically, we just buy what we like," she says, adding, "We don't need anything. But when did that ever come into play? You buy because it's beautiful."

Toting a small, unassuming cloth bag, she sets off to find "something surprising." Though a tougher job than it used to be, right off she spies enticing collectibles and remarkable bargains. For accenting an old kitchen, there are $40 rolls of 1950s linoleum, with pressed-in color squares, not the painted vinyl that is sold today, Marrin cautions.

Nearby is an early 20th-Century set of prized fireplace tiles and wood mantle by Pasadena tile maker Ernest Batchelder, original to many Craftsman houses and a deal at $700. Just the one large decorated tile in the ensemble normally would cost $200 to $300, Marrin says.

At the booth of the day's only serious Arts and Crafts furniture dealer, Marrin points out a signed Stickley secretary that is reasonably priced for $2,200--although she got hers at Goodwill for $18. A standing van Erp copper lamp is marked at a pricey $25,000.

Meanwhile, the Marrin daughters are beating Melrose vintage-clothes shops to the punch, grabbing up plastic 1950s sunglasses at $5 a pair, 1960s bathing suits and colorful broad-brimmed straw hats.

There are piles of Pop culture kitsch that might wither at Marrin's disdain--neon beer and cigarette signs, Coca-Cola memorabilia, license plates and her least-favorite trend, 1960s troll dolls. "Some people will buy anything," she laments.

Still, Marrin's own bag remains empty. Only after hours of scanning does she move in for a kill. With no browsing, no hesitation, she scoops up a pair of small 1930s Oriental lacquerware stands for $20.

Grinning, she says she's just seen a single one for $65.

Next, she darts into a crowd gathered around a jewelry case, emerging with two silver Mexican chains. Now she is openly gloating; a necklace for which she paid $20 is worth an easy $200.

"They didn't know what they had," she chortles.

Indeed, catching dealers unawares has been the couple's modus operandi since the beginning. Their favorite tale is about their rarest find, a 12-piece octagonal silver tea and coffee service designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for his Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, which was torn down in 1968.

All of the Wright silverware, except a creamer owned by his widow, was thought to have been melted down during World War II--that is, until nine years ago, when Jim Marrin discovered their set, unscathed and intact, at the Long Beach swap meet. Priced at $125, the service was gratefully sold for an even $100. It had been sitting in the dealer's antique shop in Riverside for years.

"I was jumping up and down," Jim recalls in a telephone interview from Switzerland, telling how he first saw the IH monogram, then the manufacturer's name, Fujino & Co., Tokyo, on the bottom of the creamer. After confirming the service's authenticity in a reference book, he says, "I started screaming and laughing and going crazy."

"We didn't have enough money for contemporary Scandinavian," she says with a laugh, remembering their early married life.

Their first piece was a $10 Stickley rocker, bought in 1967. Soon after came a $125 Stickley settle and, later, a pair of chairs attributed to Wright, rooted out of a junk shop on Santa Monica's Main Street for $110.

Sitting at the large Stickley dining room table, Janeen Marrin looks over the quietly furnished parlors, bathed in a muted light. The pieces that surround her have been an intrinsic part of the couple's lives.

"I love this table," she says, thinking of the future, made suddenly uncertain.

Though millionaires in possessions, the pair still is not rich in cash. While Janeen works as a part-time calligrapher designing commemorative documents for Los Angeles County, Jim, a former advertising artist, teaches at Valley College in Van Nuys.

"I'll never be a bag lady," she jokes.

Still, the couple has already undergone a significant emotional loss: The Greene & Greene lead-glass light that hovered protectively over the main parlor was sold to a private buyer for $350,000 in April, paying for, among other things, Jim's new apartment.

Selling it was "agonizing," Jim Marrin says. "Oh, God, it was tough." There was unexpected haggling over price, payments and tax writeoffs, not to mention the emotional struggle. "It's hard to part with things. You just have to look at it as though you're just a caretaker of great stuff until it has to go on to other places," he adds.

He found the light in a Hollywood junk shop just two years after they were married. "I pull up and in the window, sitting upside down, is this light fixture," he remembers. "I was in a state of shock."

The light, a museum piece made for the Freeman Ford House in Pasadena, was priced at $750 and had been destined for a client who wanted to turn it into a coffee table.

Meanwhile, both Marrins continue to collect. Jim sees Alessi household accessories and Memphis furniture as good contemporary designs, searches out 20th-Century California photographers and worries that he's beginning to see his cheap little Japanese lacquer boxes in antiques magazines.

As Janeen observes: "Everything we buy becomes collectible. Then we can't afford to buy it anymore."

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