So La Maya calls at 7:15 and announces that instead of our daily constitutional she wants to make a run on an estate sale advertised to be full of Native American crafts and Southwestern artwork. It’s in a ritzy part of town, a detail that makes the ad highly enticing.
We journey east into the rising sun and the rush-hour traffic. Takes us a half-hour to reach a hidden development nestled discreetly in the shadow of Camelback Mountain. “Ritzy” understates matters.
An enclave of large but subtly designed houses on vast lots, the place is way too classy to be gated. This evidently is where the old money fled after the parvenus moved into the Biltmore and started building hideous McMansions. The houses sprawl low to the ground: no second stories and few two-story-high cathedrals. Landscaping is what you wish you could buy with your ten or twenty grand…looks like what some designer figures the Sonoran desert would look like if only it could afford him.
Shortly we found the estate sale. Apparently the property was owned by an artist, or by someone who fancied him- or herself an artist and had plenty of money to indulge that conceit. Unbelievable. All of the walls were hand-painted with sepia-toned murals in cowboy themes. Someone had plastered river rocks around the base of a set of clerestory windows and painted the surrounding wall a brilliant cobalt blue. Windows and walls were festooned with Indian and cowboy objets: feathers and spurs and cowboy hats and silver medallions encrusted with turquoise.
Whoever lived there had interesting taste and plenty of cash to spend on it. With the exception of a couple of custom-upholstered Ethan Allen chairs and a pair of gorgeous tan leather sofas, none of the furniture was mass-produced. Everything was one-of-a-kind, either artisan-made or antique, and most of it was very handsome. The view out the back: astonishing! Camelback mountain close-up filled the sky over the backyard.
The sale featured a lot of Indianoid pottery and small tourist-size rugs. I don’t know enough about Navajo rugs to recognize the genuine article at a glance, but I do know that bright colors are questionable…and too many of them featured splashy reds and blues. As for the pottery: the glaze designs were a bit crude for authenticity. Of my pots, the ones I know are real (from New Mexico and Peru) are signed; the one I know is a knock-off is unsigned. None of the estate-sale “Indian” pots were signed. I guessed they were high-quality tourist stuff. Prices ranging from $30 to $95 suggested the same: estate sale operators usually know what they’re looking at, and they set prices accordingly.
La Maya picked up a large Talavera pot, very pretty. But as we drew near to the cash register, she realized that what she thought was a $15 price tag actually read “As IS.” They wanted $50 for it, crack and all. She decided not.
Though we came away empty-handed, we had a good time exploring the ways our betters live. As we were standing in the backyard gazing at the landmark mountain, La Maya remarked on what I thought was the neighbor’s expansive Santa Fe-style house.
“That’s not the neighbor’s place,” said she, “that’s on this piece of property. Look: the cabana and patio extend back to it—it opens onto them.”
Holy mackerel. These people had two full-sized houses on a gigantic slab of prime real estate, one of them eccentrically decorated in late Southwestern artiste and the other a quieter and more conventional dwelling.
I think the house that hosted the sale, whose layout was open and whose decor was artsy-fartsy to the nth degree, served discreetly as the artist’s studio and gallery. Unlikely anyone would want to live in it: really, it was pretty bizarre. But if your clientele was very upscale and your product wildly expensive, chances are your business would attract so little traffic that the neighbors wouldn’t complain much.
It was strange. The rich are not like us.