The Plinth Principle
Home Goods Recon Spectacular 2024
The Plane back with a Home Goods Recon Spectacular.
Our 2024 G.I.F.T.S. List, bursting with slappers for the mind, body and home, is here.
Mach 3+ intel for travel to cool places around the entire planet is here.
Around this time every year, Blackbird Spyplane devotes a full week to a Home Goods Recon Spectacular. Friends, this is that week.
But here’s the thing. Every single Home Goods Report we’ve done so far remains extremely useful — just look at our comprehensive Home Goods Index, which corrals 4+ years of crib-improving recon, helpfully arranged by category.
So this year we’ve structured a flotilla of fantastic finds around a broader home-ennobling concept. It’s a concept we’ve seen deployed in a variety of Mach 3+ environs, and put into practice ourselves. A concept that involves purchasing things sparingly — purchasing nothing at all, if you want — because at its core it’s about re-focusing the vectors of attention in a room so deftly that you see your surroundings in a new light. We call it The Plinth Principle.
It starts with actual plinths. We’ve been feeling them for a minute, but got fully plinthpilled at the Brancusi show we caught at the Pompidou this summer. In many cases, this man’s plinths (pictured above and 1. below) transfixed us even more than his sculptures proper — even as the former made the latter more beautiful to behold.
This gets at the humble genius of the plinth at its best: It can literally & figuratively elevate all manner of objects, bringing them up closer to eye level and transforming them into a radiant focal point of appreciation and contemplation. A great plinth is kind of like a three-dimensional spotlight shining from below. If a plinth could speak, it would say, Brother — get a load of this.
What deserves the spotlight atop a plinth? We’re not doctrinaire about it. You can’t go wrong with a cup filled with wildflowers, a beautiful rock, or a piece of driftwood. A pile of books you previously had on the floor. A vibey Sony clock-radio. Artwork your niece made. Artwork you made. A mirrored Barragán gazing ball. A color drip candle shedding an impasto of tacky rainbow tears down the sides of a d*mn chianti bottle. A bowl of fruit, a vase fitted with a maidenhair fern — flora, always flora. F**k it — you could arrange several things on a plinth at once, tending to the tableau like it’s one of those amazing potted gardens you see outside ground-floor apartments in Tokyo: a tiny, precise but un-precious showcase for character and LIFE!
Un-preciousness is key here. Because treating your home like an art gallery risks an over-curated airlessness. Would you really wanna curl up on the cold, hard floors in Pace and read a book? Chop it up with your friends at 11 p.m. over some beverages amid Zwirner’s board-formed concrete walls??
No. So this week we’re defining the plinth the same way you should: Expansively.
Yes, a plinth could be a carefully carved block of wood, or a roughly chainsawed one (2. below), or a stump, or a stool, or a plywood pedestal, or a chunk of stone. But also? A plinth could more metaphorically be a picture frame, a lamp, an ottoman, a side table, a loveseat, a slapping flute-edged platter, a honking coffee mug, a yanking sconce. When you adopt The Plinth Principle, that is, a plinth can be any singular thing that serves not only to accent but re-cast, rejuvenate and enswaggen the room it’s in conversation with.
This week we’ve rounded up killer versions of all of the above and more for you, including:
lighting
rugs
ceramics
bedding
tableware
and more!
Part Two is here.
Let’s get to Part One, starting with — LITERAL PLINTHS
