VINTAGE SUBURBAN Collectors are revisiting the 1970's, gathering furnishings like, top right, a gold leather Karl Springer chair, a Maria Pergay totem lamp and art by Michael Gibson. Also up for review are pieces favored in the 1980's, like Josef Hoffmann's Sitzmaschine (recliner to Yanks), above left.
REPRISED Clockwise from the brass Gabriella Crespi table, center left: a Paul Evans console; tables by Philip and Kelvin LaVerne; and one of a pair of Joe D'Urso tables valued at $5,000. (Photographs by Sothebys, Rago Arts and Auction Center, Chris Sansbury, Wright and Brian Franczyk, and Robin Nelson for The New York Times)

9/23/04 - A New High-Risk Look

My stylish friend Scott is politic about the more questionable things I collect. I bought a 1960's tufted sofa last year, puffy and colorful. It looks like someone who fell off the South Beach diet, in South Beach.

"It's directional," Scott said, after a few beats of silence, looking at it with a cold eye, then approval. Not good, not bad, but directional.

In today's quick world, that might be enough. Even my sofa is so five minutes ago, as the market for collectible modern design races forward this fall into the future of the past, rediscovering with a shortening half-life the last gasps of the 20th century — the 1970's, 80's and 90's — and pioneering the edges of acceptable taste.

What is at an expensive height of voguishness, like the French 1940's and 50's, is so 10 minutes ago, say the directionalists. (The Eameses, Knolls and Nelson are clocking in at 15.) Consider instead Maria Pergay, Paco Rabanne, Gabriella Crespi, Karl Springer, Willy Rizzo, John Dickinson, Philip and Kelvin LaVerne, Paul Evans, Joe D'Urso, Pierre Cardin and Jay Spectre.

Directional is the new good and bad. You don't have to choose anymore. Though unproven by time or track record in important sales, what excites the moment owns the moment. And decorators, dealers, clients and collectors right now seem to be daring one another to blink, as the less and less likely is reappraised and begins to appreciate.

"You push it each time a little bit further," said Oliver Miller, who picks over used furniture out in the field for resale to modern design shops in New York like Duane. "I'm doing a lot of buying on Long Island, and I'm starting to find good quality 80's furniture, which sort of scares me — vintage 80's `decorator taste.' It has a look that hasn't yet taken hold, but I'll fill a warehouse and put it away for five years."

Mr. Miller might not have to wait.

"It's a Long Island aesthetic," said William Stewart, an Atlanta interior designer, describing his work for two clients, Deb and Tony Clancy. Mr. Stewart assembled a sizable collection of Karl Springer, a directional favorite, who specialized in big shapes and exotic coverings like Asian bullfrog. Mr. Springer had a good run in Architectural Digest in the 1970's and 80's. In fact much of what is directional looks like a homage to that publication's extravagant, stilted style, with a 20-year retard.

"Trust me. When I first starting showing LaVerne and Springer, people were holding their nose," said Evan Lobel, of Lobel Modern, a New York gallery. "Decorators can make the leap."

Pascal Boyer, also a New York dealer, has sold five LaVerne items since June, including a pair of tables to Juan Montoya, a prominent interior designer, but, he said, "Clients and collectors look at it and don't really understand."

Mr. Stewart in Atlanta explained: "Modern is changing — modernism has become decorator taste of the past. You look at it and say, `Is that good design or not good design?' But it's kind of fresh, and it goes together beautifully with contemporary designs like J. Robert Scott and Donghia — they're the Karl Springers of the 2000's."

The next wave of collecting, especially from the 1970's and 80's, now involves serious money, too, at prices accelerating as fast as the tight cycle reviving the reputations of designers — now a scant eight years, according to one auction house expert.

The standard defense is that the pieces are well made (Springer) or singular (Pergay) or the output of artists (Philip and Kelvin LaVerne) or that they were expensive when new (all of the above). The traditional midcentury modern market is now flooded with reproductions and ordinary examples. Genuine rarities, like prototypes or unseen models, are extremely rare and unaffordable to most buyers. And though directional collecting can be a little raw — "I never say `ugly,' but `not to everyone's taste,' " said Jack C. Anderson, a New York interior designer — modern classics can begin to look repetitive and, as important as they are, boring.

"We have a lot of 40's and 50's French," said Ms. Clancy in Atlanta. "You can only have so much Royère and Prouvé before it looks the same. We've sort of segued into the next thing. Seventies lines are clean, and you can mix it. I said to my husband the other day, `Maybe we should start selling the other stuff.' " The Clancys were awaiting a shipment of Pierre Cardin. Furnishings by fashion designers is a direction being explored generally.

"Absolutely," Ms. Clancy replied, when asked if friends and neighbors thought she and her husband had lost their minds.

Michael Bruno, the founder of 1stdibs .com, a Web site that displays furnishings for sale by more than 350 dealers internationally, 70 percent of whom specialize in modern design, said that the 1960's and 70's, especially lighting, was receiving the most attention on the site.

Liz O'Brien, a New York dealer, described the appeal of the era, heavy on metals, as "industrial design taken to the max, where it works as interior design, too."

In part the strengthening influence of directional collecting is a product of younger dealers' plying the wares. Mr. Miller is 32. Paul Johnson, a colleague, who now sells furniture on his own from his New York garment district loft and at phurniture.com online, is 30. They don't shiver with flashbacks when confronted with mirror chrome and gold leather.

Mr. Johnson, who helped provide the furnishings for the Park restaurant and bar and the Maritime Hotel, is concentrating on art and sculpture from the 1970's by lesser-known artists like Dennis Byng and Ronald Mallory, a kinetic sculptor whose work is also very immediately 70's in period look.

"We're just touching the surface of the 70's — there's a lot still out there that's good," Mr. Johnson said. "To create the market for something new, you have to create the energy for it. But because no one's buying it yet, you can amass enough, as a dealer, to show people what that energy was."

Mr. Johnson has consigned a pair of small minimalist stainless steel tables to Wright in Chicago, a leading auction house for modern design. They were designed by Joe D'Urso for Knoll in the 1980's, in the school of design that Mr. Stewart in Atlanta, who is 49, characterized as "kind of a cocaine aesthetic, before AIDS, when Liza Minnelli and Halston were running around." The tables, which have no auction record and will be offered on Oct. 3, are estimated to sell for $5,000 to $7,000, a figure that reflects a reserve set by Mr. Johnson and which Richard Wright, the auctioneer, called "honestly higher than I would want them — I would have liked to offer them at half that."

Mr. Wright, 40, explained that he deferred to the seller because "Paul Johnson defines a younger generation, and this is what looks fresh to him." Mr. Wright added that there is "a real resistance to the 80's."

"It's a very hard sell," he said. "It would be an area to look at — if you're brave. You don't have the historical context yet. You don't have the full story." (Sotheby's, in what could be a clever, if oblique move, is selling the modern design inventory of Barry Friedman, a forerunning dealer in the category, which includes icons like Josef Hoffmann's Sitzmaschine. Hoffmann's early-20th-century Austrian look was the height of chic in 1980's décor.)

Directional collecting, in its adolescence at best, is not an unchallenged series of successes. Some revived reputations have been hard won, and others are still a battle. And as with the market for anything, there are strong positions now that won't hold.

Paul Evans, a Pennsylvania craft designer who worked in what could be called a "suburban brutalist" style, takes the Happy at Last directional design award.

Evans, an "acquired taste" as several dealers described his work, was slow to gather force as a collectible, and the tide is just now turning. David Rago, who with John Sollo runs modern design auctions in Lambertville, N.J., tried selling Evans in 1993.

"We're certainly the most persistent," Mr. Rago said. "It was funky, but we knew it was quality material."

In 1999, he sold an Evans console with an estimated sale price of $7,000 to $9,000 for $16,000, the start of Evans's ascent. Evans is the subject of an exhibition in Paris, where he is something of a fad, at Galerie Patrick Fourtin, open through Oct. 30.

To be accepted by the French will only confirm for skeptics here that Evans is the Jerry Lewis of modern design.

Adam Lindemann, the chairman of Mega Communications, and a recent Evans collector, who now owns 20 pieces housed upstate in his weekend home, not only doesn't care, but also seems to love the adversity that the designs bring on — the embodiment of a directional collector.

"Paul Evans is very wacky, very out of fashion, an aesthetic that's fallen over a cliff," Mr. Lindemann said. "Everything's Prouvé — super-duper hot, tasteful and beautiful. Evans wasn't a lot of money, and I'm a contrarian."

Mr. Lindemann's appraisal coalesced suddenly.

"The really ugly stuff looks like the furniture on the Klingon spaceship," he said, then qualified his comment.

"The original `Star Trek.' "

Point taken.