Permanent Collection

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Permanent Collection

Permanent Collection is a curated line of clothing, accessories, and design objects based on historical and contemporary design classics.

California‐native, London‐based curators Mariah Nielson and F***y Singer have created Permanent Collection: a line of luxury clothing, accessories and objects based on historical and contemporary originals. Inspired by the principles that guide acquisitions at the world’s greatest museums, Permanent Collection offers pieces defined by timeless value, whose currency as art and design will endure. D

aughters of legendary Northern Californian artist J.B. Blunk and world-renowned chef Alice Waters, respectively, Mariah and F***y met in London while studying design and art history at the Royal College of Art and the University of Cambridge. Mariah and F***y recognized in each other a shared set of values, in relation to fashion and personal style, but also to how they approached design and art. Their graduate studies, and their curatorial experience at institutions including The Serpentine and Tate Modern, led them to the idea of applying curatorial rigor to the world of fashion and design. They began by selecting a group of historical designs they felt were elegant, minimal and versatile: the types of pieces they believed would become the staples of a personal “permanent collection.”

Permanent Collection offers understated yet indispensable clothing, accessories and design objects that will never go out of style.

05/29/2026

— Today we’re in Wermatswil, Switzerland, at the Ridi & Otto Kolb House, designed by architect Otto Kolb for himself and his family.

Born in Switzerland in 1921, Kolb began as a bricklaying apprentice before studying architecture and joining progressive avant-garde circles that included Le Corbusier, Max Bill, and Mies van der Rohe. In 1947, he was invited to teach at the Institute of Design in Chicago, emigrating to the USA at 27.

During the 1960s, Kolb focused on furniture design and family homes. In 1965, he invented a standardized spiral staircase that he patented and manufactured, making a living marketing them. From 1980 to 1982, after a prolific career on both sides of the Atlantic, Kolb built his own family home with his workers during quiet production phases, using leftover staircase elements.

The circular house is a complete recycling product and a total work of art—Kolb designed the architecture, built-in furniture, freestanding furniture, and lighting as one integrated vision. Stones came from site excavation, metal from factory waste. At the center sits a water cistern filled from roof collectors. Wall panels function as wall heating. Water runs through the fireplace grate to back up heating. A semi-circular outdoor pool reflects sunlight into the house.

In the main living area, small ponds surround a pillar-like fireplace with one of Kolb’s signature staircases spiraling upward. Rooms branch off different levels creating open, interconnected space. The living room and kitchen are separated by thin plywood partitions, with the sunken lounge surrounded by water.

Otto Kolb died in 1996. His wife Ridi lived in the family home until her death in spring 2022. In 2012, the house was classified as a protected building of regional importance. The building is currently uninhabited. “What will happen to it is still up in the air,” says Claudia. “But one thing is clear: it will be preserved.”

Sources: World of Interiors, Zalaba Design

05/26/2026

We’re down to our last stock of Acqua e Vino, Martino Gamper’s set of handblown glasses made by Massimo Lunardon in northern Italy. Conceived for specific types of drinking, the set pairs narrow tall glasses for sparkling wine, narrow short for white, wide short for red, and a carafe for water — each marked with one of Gamper’s signature pale colored bands. 15 Red, 5 Blue, 11 Gold, and 10 Green are left in stock and we’re not expecting another shipment until late this year or early next.

05/25/2026

— American painter Noah Davis (1983-2015) created a distinctive body of figurative paintings depicting Black people in everyday scenarios while exploring emotional textures of life.   Born June 1983 in Seattle, Washington, he started painting in his early teens and had his own studio by age 17. He studied painting at Cooper Union School of Art in New York but left before graduating, moving to Los Angeles in 2004.

In Los Angeles he worked at the MOCA bookstore. He developed a distinctive style employing thin washes and thick layers of paint, influenced by painters Marlene Dumas, Luc Tuymans, Mark Rothko, and Fairfield Porter.

In 2012, Davis and his wife, artist Karon Davis, founded the Underground Museum in Arlington Heights, a working-class Black and Latinx neighborhood far from Los Angeles’s mainstream art scenes. They wanted to bring museum-quality art “within walking distance” to a community that had no access to it.

Davis used vintage photographs of Black life as source material, creating scenes of family life, people swimming, resting, enjoying leisure. “If I’m making any statement, it’s to just show Black people in normal scenarios, where drugs and guns are nothing to do with it,” he stated. His Imitation of Wealth exhibition opened at the Underground Museum the day of his death.

Davis died August 2015 in Ojai, California at age 32 from a rare cancer. Work held by MoMA, Whitney Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Hammer Museum.

Sources: Alta Journal, David Zwirner, Wikipedia

05/22/2026

— Today we’re exploring the gardens of Beatrix Farrand, one of America’s first landscape architects. 
Born Beatrix Jones in 1872 into New York society, she was the niece of Edith Wharton. While most women of her class were expected to marry and host salons, Beatrix was drawn to plants from childhood. Her grandmother taught her to deadhead roses in Newport. Her mother, Mary Cadwalader Jones, worked as a literary agent out of their East 11th Street townhouse, and her aunt Edith became a novelist. Beatrix saw women who worked. 
In her late teens, she met Mary Sargent, wife of Charles Sargent who headed Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum. Beatrix began studying landscape gardening, botany, and horticulture at the Arboretum and at the Sargents’ Brookline estate. She learned to work with a site’s natural features rather than reshape the land to fit a design. At 23, she started her practice from a room in her mother’s house. At 27, she was asked to be a charter member of the American Society of Landscape Architects—the only woman included. 
Over 50 years, Farrand received more than 200 commissions. She mixed formal designs with wild, natural-looking plantings, favoring native species and local materials. Her best-known work is Dumbarton Oaks in Washington DC, where she collaborated with owner Mildred Bliss for 26 years. She also designed the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Garden in Seal Harbor, Maine, Bellefield in Hyde Park, New York (her oldest surviving garden from 1912), campus landscapes at Princeton and Yale, and consulted on her aunt’s estate gardens at The Mount in Lenox, Massachusetts. 
At 44, she married historian Max Farrand. When he became director of the Huntington Library in California, she traveled between coasts, managing her East Coast offices from California. She turned her Maine summer home, Reef Point, into a study garden and library for landscape architecture students.  Most of her gardens are now lost, but her work survives at Dumbarton Oaks, the Rockefeller Garden, Bellefield, and Dartington Hall in Devon, England. 
Sources: Wikipedia, Arnold Arboretum, National Park Service, 1st Dibs

05/21/2026

After our last restock instantly sold out, our Maple and Walnut Semicircle Cutting Boards are back! Perfect for smaller kitchens, or as a statement piece when displayed as a set, these boards are as functional as they are handsome. Handmade in Los Angeles from sustainable, salvaged wood.

05/19/2026

Pre-orders are open for our Mortar & Pestle! This ceramic mortar and pestle is drawn from the kitchen collection of , founder of Chez Panisse. Based on one of her most indispensable tools, a Japanese suribachi, this piece is perfect for making vinaigrettes, pounding sauces or grinding spices.

This hard-wearing, versatile mortar and pestle will become your favorite kitchen friend. Hand-thrown by .hennessey, the mortar comes with a hand-turned pestle made from solid, sustainably-sourced maple.

05/18/2026

— German-born British-American modernist sculptor Ruth Duckworth (1919-2009) specialized in ceramics, creating hand-built, minimalist, abstract organic forms that established clay as a sculptural medium when it was not widely accepted.

Born Ruth Windmüller in April 1919 in Hamburg, Germany, the daughter of a Jewish father and Lutheran mother, she could not study art in N**i Germany and left for England in 1936. She studied at Liverpool College of Art, Hammersmith School of Art, and City and Guilds of London Art School where she learned stone carving and worked as a tombstone engraver.

She studied ceramics at Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. While her early work followed traditional forms, she increasingly produced abstract works. She married British artist Aidron Duckworth.
In 1964 she accepted a teaching appointment at University of Chicago, continuing for 13 years and remaining in Chicago until her death.

She befriended meteorologist Tetsuya “Ted” Fujita and was drawn to aerial photography and geophysical mapping. These interests informed her career-defining public murals “Earth, Water, Sky” for the Henry Hinds Laboratory for Geophysical Sciences, and the clay-tile mural “Clouds Over Lake Michigan.”

She is best known for ultra-smooth, unglazed white porcelain surfaces, though she occasionally added ceramic oxide stains and later cast forms in bronze. Her work channels earth’s imperceptible forces—storm systems, lake currents, tectonic plates, cloud and wind patterns. She famously declared “Everything is clay.”

She died October 2009 in Chicago at age 90. Work held by Smithsonian American Art Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Sources: ,

05/15/2026

— Today we’re in Beverly Glen, California, at the Walstrom House, designed by architect John Lautner in 1969. 
Electrical engineer Douglas Walstrom and his wife Octavia were acquainted with Lautner’s work through their aerospace industry colleague Leonard Malin, owner of the Chemosphere. Lautner developed three design schemes for their half-acre hillside lot: a large tube with platforms floating within, a pair of cylinders, and a tower. The Walstroms chose the tower. 
The 1,400-square-foot wooden treehouse feels like a return to Lautner’s houses of the 1940s, defined by the warmth of wood and deceptively simple geometries. From the street, the house appears to float above the wooden carport canopy, anchored to the hillside only by two massive glulam beams extending from the steep-sloped roof down into concrete foundations. The roofs of the main house and carport were painted forest green to integrate house and hill. 
The entryway sits between two floors. Walking left down a few steps leads to the master and guest bedrooms. Walking up a ramp leads to the main living space with an 18-foot ceiling at its peak. Exposed wooden beams on the ceiling fan out slightly, creating movement and enlarging the space from inside. A banister-free staircase leads to a small mezzanine encased in plywood above the bookcase. Douglas Walstrom did some of the carpentry himself and designed a system to open six windows at once with the pull of a lever. Abundant glass dissolves the boundary between inside and outside. 
The house was built by Wally Niewadomski, who collaborated with Lautner on Silvertop, the Elrod House, and the Bob Hope House. The Walstrom House was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2016 and remains a private residence. 
Sources: ,
Photos: Julius Shulman / / / Jon Buono

05/14/2026

“I love beeswax candles so much I keep a stockpile of them in my pantry and start to fret when the reserves dip below a half-dozen pairs. I light them every day at dinnertime, to officially mark a change in our day from work to rest and togetherness. I still believe that beeswax candles are the best hostess gift around.” —

Pair a set of our beeswax candles with ceramic candleholders as the perfect gift or to complete your own table.

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Larkspur, CA
94939

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http://www.permanentcollection.com/

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