Its interesting, the "Studio" pieces seemed to have leveled off a bit pricewise, while the production pieces for Directional continue to go up...there is probably more competition for the production pieces since they are not in the mid five figures into six figures.

The Nakashima prices still seem to be pretty strong.

I would imagine that some of these really expensive pieces are such that Rago and the other houses that get these pieces have a good idea who is going to be in the market for them.

When the $8M Garvan Carver table sold, someone I knew who had two Garvan Carver pieces told me that the public auction for that particular piece was unnecesary and just amounted to good publicity for the auction house. He estimated that there were about a dozen people in the US who had both the means and the interest to pay several million dollars for that particular piece of furniture, and the auction company could have made some phone calls and gotten it sold. This particular piece was previously unknown which is why it went for such an astronomical price. But it did go to one of the dozen people (he remained anonymous because of the price), not a newbie.

My acquaintance originally owned one piece, and it was known to have a mate, and when the owner of that one died, he called around and said "Listen, I own the other piece, and I would really like to have it, so if it comes up at auction,I am very motivated to get them together, and I think they should be together". I don't remember if he got it by auction or by private sale, but he did end up with the second piece.

I guess though, by comparison, a $60K Evans or Nakashima piece could be bought by any random hedge funder or internet app inventor etc.

Now you're just showin' off...;) Interesting to get a glimpse into the ways of the in-in-crowd though. Reminds me of the book I found on the Gulbenkian Foundation and Calouste Gulbenkian's hunting strategies.

And I'm not greedy; I'd gladly be a random internet app inventor, as long as I could still teach ESOL : )

I just happened to see the one guy as a regular patient. I knew he would have heard of those pieces, but I never had a clue he would own any or know the $8M buyer. I should've guessed, one time we were talking about flying and I mentioned the hassle of this or that and he had no idea what I was talking about...then he kinda smacked his forehead and said, ah...we have a jet, I forgot about what its like to fly commercial--it's a different world, but sometimes they randomly intersect.

I am curious to see the hammer prices on the Evans pieces. They should be up later today or tomorrow.

The "ugly" cabinet went for $22,320: slightly under estimate.

The highest price was a sofa made of nickels by Johnny Swing, at $99,000 (est. $45-65,000)

A Nakashima Conoid bench went for $34,000, about 2x its mid estimate price.