The Private Collection of Mindy Papp, Bedford, NY
Mindy Papp was a pioneering English furniture dealer in New York and every time I visited Florian Papp it was always a delight to see her. Mindy was very curious about everything, always looking at furniture and sharing her knowledge. She was a regular client at STAIR and we all enjoyed working with her and her colleagues. Mindy’s house in Bedford was charm personified. We are honored to share with everyone some of the beautiful things she collected and lived with. Our thanks to Clinton Howell for sharing a most thoughtful tribute to his dear friend. She will be missed.—Colin Stair
Thursday Morning at STAIR in October features a curated selection of furniture, fine art and decorations from interesting collectors and estates including The Private Collection of Mindy Papp, Bedford, NY. Highlights from the Papp collection include a tufted leather Chesterfield sofa, a set of eight Victorian embossed leather and oak dining chairs, and a W.A.S. Benson brass floor lamp.
Remembering Mindy Papp
By: Clinton Howell
It’s hard to imagine the twenty-five year old Mindy Papp, working at her brand new job in television in Chicago and finding out that her father had an illness that threatened the closure of their seventy year old antiques business on Madison Ave., in New York City. What do you do? For Mindy, she didn’t have to think about it—she quit her job and moved back to New York, into a basement flat that I remember as having very little light, and then going to work for the family business, Florian Papp Antiques. Begun by her grandfather, if I remember correctly, in 1903, the Papps were one of the firms that I was curious to get to know on my own return from England in 1976.
I remember my first visit to the gallery very well. The office was in the basement and Mindy came upstairs where I explained who I was and we then walked upstairs. Within minutes, Mindy was on the floor asking me to look at the underside of a table that had unusual construction. If anyone had wandered in, I would not have blamed them for thinking that we were up to some hanky panky, but that was Mindy’s style. Dive in, engage and start a dialogue and don’t worry about what people might be thinking. She was warm and enthusiastic and eager to share what she knew and eager to know more, not just about furniture but about her audience.
I remember being invited to an opening at Florian Papp and seeing Robert Metzger, the very flamboyant decorator, sweep into her gallery in his white linen suit and Mindy saying all the right things. If she was a student of English furniture, she was a master in relationships. She knew how to keep her clients happy and she did. Furthermore, she knew what to buy and she never let dealer innuendo about items slow her down. If she felt something was right, she bought it.
Mindy’s greatest pleasure was, however, in her country home in Bedford, NY where she and her husband, Guy Durham, built their house they named Nether. Nether was the imaginary construction of an English home that began, humbly, in the 15th century, was added to in the 16th and added to again in the 17th. Guy and Mindy spent countless hours searching for beams, floorboards, doors, ironwork—anything you might find in a home where prosperity had made its mark over three centuries. And they filled it with items of the period that are on sale here now. The collection of things is personal meaning that Guy and Mindy had a story about everything.
The joy that Guy and Mindy took in creating their home, Nether, was transcendent—it was a magical place. Everything that they bought had a place and a story. This is not so different from what all of us do, but as they already had a story about their house, the objects within it also had their own stories—the real story about where the object was found, and the made up story with how it fit into the history of their home. It is, in a way, a form of supra-collecting, buying interesting and unusual items and then imagining the family that might have used these pieces in the first place. Mindy, of course, knew that this was what buying old things was all about. What is life without a good story? And hers was pretty amazing.
Clinton Howell Antiques is a New York City-based antique dealer in very fine English antique furniture and decorative objects, serving a world-wide clientele of collectors, designers and museums alike.