Picture a massive building, with shelves upon shelves filled with incredible pieces of furniture from every modern era, like a mashup of some design history textbook. On our recent trip to Chicago, we had the honor of meeting Richard Wright and touring his auction house. Only one thing topped the tour, and that was hearing Wright’s story of how he’s made it all happen.
Richard Wright turned vintage resale into a serious multi-million dollar business.
When did you start out on this path?
I started in the vintage world in 1986, purely by accident. I lived in Boston and was going to school. I wanted to be a writer. Through an old girlfriend, I discovered the vintage world. She wore all vintage clothes. At that time vintage clothes were just kind of coming in. It was the first wave of it. She was from St. Louis, and she realized, “I could buy vintage trenchcoats in St. Louis for a quarter, and we could sell them here in Boston for $20.” And I was like, “A quarter? $20? Let’s quit school!”
She was 3 credits away from an art history degree at BU, and she dropped out of school. Her parents were like, “What the fuck are you doing?!”
Oh my god. That’s amazing!
I had $2,000 and a car. We hit the road and started this crazy adventure, picking clothes. A little while into it, I discovered I didn’t like picking clothes – they’re dirty, and I didn’t really get it. So I started looking at objects. Before long I was buying kitschy clocks and lamps and things that.
Her father was an architect in St. Louis. He said to me, “What are you doing to my daughter? You don’t know anything! Do you even know Charles Eames?” And of course I said, “No…” So he made us stop everything and start learning the history. I think he felt, “OK, if you’re going to do this, at least do it the right way.” And it was perfect – we both started really studying. We’d go to the libraries, pull out all the vintage magazines, interiors magazines, and go through them all and learn it.
Pieces from Wright’s Important Design auction, June 2009
Soon we had all this knowledge. It was really a cool time to be doing this, because as I said, it was the first wave of vintage. There were hardly any vintage shops, and it was before the internet. We’d buy stuff out in the midwest, because it was cheap, and we’d drive it into New York every 2 weeks to sell it. We did the 26th St. flea market for a few years. When we got tired of that, we started doing the pier show in New York, which was a fancy show at the time. Then we moved into an antique mall space, and finally we opened a little gallery.
Was it in New York or Chicago?
It was here in Chicago, on Lincoln Avenue. They we broke up. She’s still a dealer here – we’re still friends.
I ran my little store for a couple of years, but ultimately got bored with that. It was tiny, I was maxed out in terms of what I could do, and the Chicago market was terrible. So I was going to close my store and move to New York. I had a lot of friends there – it was sort of the center of the business. I put a big sign in my window, “Going out of business.” Then my wife, who was a client at the time, called me and was like, “What are you doing? Why are you going out of business?”
I told her, “Oh, I’m closing to move to New York.” She said, “Really? We haven’t gotten to know each other yet. Can we at least have lunch?” OK, sure. We did, and the next thing you know I closed my store and I moved in with her.
Pieces from Wright’s Modern Design auction, March 2009
That’s such a great story!
I really was kind of drifting, at that point. Fortunately, right then a company called Treadway in Oak Park did the very first modern auction in America. They had been doing Arts & Crafts pieces, and somehow came up with the idea to do 50’s stuff. An old friend of mine was the specialist out there. He did 3 of the auctions, and then got disgusted and left, but called me up for the job.
I went out there in 1994, ran their modern department until 1999. It ended up being great training for me. I learned how to do auctions. In ‘99, I did the first auction of all Charles Eames materials. It was very important for me – it was very personal. My wife helped me art direct it. We hired a graphic designer and we did this incredible catalog like nothing people had ever seen in the auction world. It was basically like a magazine, or a book design. Nobody made the catalogs look sexy, back then – even Christie’s and Sotheby’s looked dumpy.
The catalog blew everybody’s minds. It was fantastic. It really made me see, “Oh, I can do this, I’ve got a bigger vision here.” But the guys at Treadway didn’t understand why you would pay $5,000 to have a catalog designed. So in ‘99 I left there, and in 2000 opened my own auction house in a little loft space.
What was your vision for the catalogs when you started your own company?
I tried to make it fun. I wrote little personal quips about the pieces. In the photographs, I added accessories, like a starfish on a surfboard table. We took cues from the way the stuff was shot originally. For the layout of the catalog, we did so many firsts – big, bold graphics on the cover, pictures crossing over two pages, supergraphics, and more of an open grid system, not everything in a picture box. We’ve done location shots – we’ve taken stuff out to Frank Lloyd Wright places, we’ve shot on the beach, we’ve shot in strange little parks and alleys… We’ve just tried to explore what we can do visually with the pieces. That’s the fun part.
Wright’s auction catalogs
What was your first auction on your own like?
It was really cobbled together. We had no money – maybe $30,000. I called all of my friends and begged them to give me something for my first sale. Somehow we pulled together an auction, and we did $400,000.
Wow.
The timing ended up being perfect. By that time, in 2000, I’d already been in the game 14 years. And I didn’t realize, “Gosh, everything’s so cheap.” If you don’t have any money, $2,000 or $3,000 for a piece doesn’t seem that cheap. But then the marked just skyrocketed. By 2005 or 2006, we sold a Noguchi coffee table for $630,000. Which was more than our entire first auction, just that one item!
It really illustrated a shift. So our first year we did $1 million, then we did $2 million, then we did $10 million. We kept really moving. We kept hiring people, and it was a kind of fun, crazy time. And then we moved into this building. It’s 40,000 square feet – It used to be a print house. There’s amazing parallels between the printing industry and auction houses. There’s a front of the house and back of the house, there’s a workflow, and you need a big loading dock.
It was a good ride. But in 2007, my wife ended up getting cancer and dying. It was horrible. Our boys are very young. So it was a crazy ride, because it was wonderful and then it was crushing. A lot of the credit of the business goes to her. We were a great team. She really had vision. When we first walked into this building, we both loved it, but I was scared as hell. It was too big! She said “No no, we can do this, we’ve got to do this.” She was really always pushing, while I was the more conservative one.
Tagliata Arne chair by Martino Gamper for Wright
Where is the auction house heading now?
After she died, to keep engaged and because the industry is moving, the contemporary design thing started to take over here. That’s been the new thing I’ve done to keep it interesting to me. I love vintage stuff, but I’ve handled a lot of it.
Economically, the market sort of peaked in 2007. We did $27 million at auction. Which, for a company this size, is a lot. And then we did about $15 million last year, and this year we’ll probably do 10. It’s really kind of come back down. The transition’s been incredibly hard, but I actually think that there’s good things in it. I think you do better quality work when it’s harder.
How did your collaborations with contemporary designers start?
Contemporary design started to become very interesting to our clients. We started selling more of it at auction, and you were seeing super-high prices. I decided that it would be interesting to try to commission somebody to do a program. I happened to be in London at the Frieze Fair, and met Arik Levy, who is a charming guy. I brought up the idea and he said, “OK, let’s do something!”
Typical of the way I’ve run my business, I didn’t have a plan of where I was going. So we did that, it was fun, and then I met Martino Gamper and thought, “Hey, he’s cool, let’s do something with Martino.” And then I found Ron Gilad through a Cooper Hewitt show. So it’s kind of just evolved. Now I’m trying to fit a business framework around it. We’re working on launching a website for distributing our contemporary program.
What’s really cool about contemporary design is the opportunity to commission work from the best in the industry. I do a little bit of work in the fine art world, but man that is a closed world. You can’t just call up Damien Hirst and work with him. Design, on the other hand, is an open world. You can meet the most famous designers and work with them – and they will come up with something amazing. I think commissioned design can be very important, and that’s the role I want to continue to play.
Console No. 1 by Ron Gilad for Wright