Close
By Kim Palmer
Age and beauty are intertwined in the discerning eye of designer and antiques dealer Michael Trapp.
STIR: You clearly love antiquities, and the distressed, patinated finishes that develop with age. Why?
MT: I like things that are honestly used and loved, worn from use and care. Anything really beautiful has been used and dropped. Perfect things are too mundane, a little too precious. The colors in patinas are complex. If you look at a good patina, it has multiple colors, one laid on top of the other. Verdigris isn't something you paint on.
STIR: So you don't believe in faking patina?
MT: When I paint my walls, there are layers and washes, creating the sense of age. The walls in my shop have 16 layers. I keep building up this wonderful depth. They're soft gray. Not quite cement, not mouse gray, but layers of washes of gray.
STIR: How do you choose what to display in the shop?
MT: It's purely inspiration, usually desperation. I just look around and say, "That's cool." The shop is always moving and changing. It's not a museum. It's kind of like a tide that moves in and out.
STIR: What's moving with the tide right now?
MT: Right now, I have a pretty cool French sycamore table and an old Italian leather chair, and tamarind seeds hanging from the ceiling ... and collections of insects from Paris. I love natural history and science.
STIR: Do you have a favorite specimen?
MT: I love those butterflies from Brazil that are intense iridescent blue. They are amazing. Mother Nature does the best, in color and design.
STIR: What's the most curious thing you've ever had in the shop?
MT: That could be a very long list. I had a whale skeleton — a pilot whale. It's 25 feet long. I took it home and mounted it above the dining table.
STIR: Tell us about a piece in the shop that you love for its color.
MT: A big pile of mid-19th century storage jars from Borneo. They have an intense emerald green to turquoise blue glaze that varies with the heat of firing, with little bits of deep plum.
STIR: You travel — what country inspires you most?
MT: Cambodia has a beautiful sense of color. They combine really unusual colors very successfully — like acid green and saffron. It's so sophisticated, and it translates easily to a Western palette.
STIR: Share a color risk you've taken recently.
MT: I have a chief's robe from Guyana that I was using as a carpet and is now on my bed. It's an intense pattern in a room with a lot of pattern already — that was the risk. There's a striped Iranian rug on the floor, and a Sumatran mounted textile in purple and green. The bedside tables are covered with 18th-century carpet fragments. I love old, threadbare textiles.
STIR: What colors do you surround yourself with at home?
MT: I like natural colors but I also like intensity. I love Baroque, 17th-century colors — rich, intense and encompassing. I love yellow rooms, and a lot of intense red inside yellow rooms. There's an energy, an opulence.