The Flâneur Method

In nineteenth-century Paris, there was a kind of person called a flâneur.

He walked. That was more or less the job. He wandered the boulevards and the glass-roofed shopping arcades with no particular destination, watching people, looking in windows, noticing things. Baudelaire wrote about him. Walter Benjamin later spent years trying to understand him. The flâneur was a connoisseur of the street, someone who treated the city as something to be read slowly.

I think about him a lot, which is funny, because I live in Los Angeles, and nobody here walks anywhere.

But the idea translates. At Joey Rose we call it the Flâneur Method: wandering, noticing and following the interesting thing. It's how we hunt, and it's the closest thing we have to a philosophy of sourcing.

Wandering on purpose

The flâneur's wandering wasn't aimless, exactly. It was open. He went out without a fixed plan so he could see what the city offered that day.

That's the first rule. You don't walk into a hunt with your mind made up. You might be looking for a dining table, but if you're only looking for a dining table, you'll walk right past the lamp that changes the whole room. You have to leave space for the thing you didn't come for.

I meander. I look. I feel. And then something catches my eye, and the hunt actually begins.

Set an intention, then let go of it

This sounds like a contradiction, but it isn't. Before I go out, especially for a client, I set an intention. It's almost a little prayer: show me what's meant for this person. Make it evident.

Then I let go of whatever I thought it would look like.

The intention tells you who you're looking for. It doesn't tell you what. That openness is the method. If you hold the picture too tightly, you'll only see things that match it, and the best finds almost never match the picture.

Notice everything, love almost nothing

The flâneur noticed everything, and that's a skill you can train. Look at the underside of a table. Look at how a chair is joined. Notice weight, finish, wear, proportion, the way a shape holds a room even from across a store.

But noticing isn't buying. Most of what you notice, you'll leave. The method only works if you're demanding about what actually comes home. The eye gets sharper by seeing hundreds of things and saying no to almost all of them, so that when the yes arrives, you trust it.

Follow the detour

Some of the best places to hunt are the ones you find because you were going somewhere else.

My days already zigzag across Los Angeles because of my garden work with Wild & Tame, so the city becomes the route. If I'm in West Hollywood, I'm looking at what's within a few miles of West Hollywood. If I'm driving to Malibu, I'm looking at Malibu. A mom-and-pop thrift store you'd never have searched for shows up because you were stuck at a light in front of it.

The modern flâneur has a phone and a car instead of an arcade. Fine. The principle holds: let the route be part of the hunt, and stop when something pulls you in.

Let one thing lead to another

When something does catch my eye, it usually doesn't arrive alone. It starts a story.

A lamp suggests a color. The color suggests a fabric. The fabric suggests what a couch should be re-covered in, and suddenly I'm hunting for a chair that answers all of it. I think of it as a story map. One object opens the next door.

This is why the method is slow in the right way. You can't plan the map in advance. You draw it as you go.

Come home empty-handed sometimes

A flâneur doesn't measure a walk by what he bought. Some days you find nothing, and that isn't failure. It's information. And honestly, it makes me hunt harder. You're out there. I know you are.

The empty days teach you where things aren't, and they keep you hungry for the day when it all lines up.

Try it yourself

You don't need to hire anyone to practice this. Next weekend, go to a thrift store or an estate sale with no list. Give yourself an hour. Touch things. Turn them over. Notice what you keep coming back to and ask yourself why.

You might come home with nothing. You might come home with a new obsession. Either way, you'll have looked at the world a little more closely, which is the whole point.

And if you'd rather have someone else do the wandering, that's what our personal vintage sourcing is for. A client gives us an assignment, and we take it out into Los Angeles: the thrift stores, the estate sales, the flea markets, the places you only find by taking the wrong turn. We send photographs as we go, and we bring home the things that were worth the detour.

The city as something to be read

Baudelaire's flâneur believed the city was full of beauty that only revealed itself to people willing to look slowly. I believe that about Los Angeles, too. It just reveals itself in strip-mall thrift stores and Saturday estate sales and a Marketplace listing photographed in terrible light.

The beauty is there. You have to wander into it.