Gloss Houses

LONDON—The glossy pages of Phillips de Pury & Company’s sale catalogues may soon be part of some fashionable real estate for the winged creatures of London. The auction house has recruited artists and designers—including Tom Dixon, Gabriel Orozco, and Tim Noble and Sue Webster—to create bird, bat and bee houses out of the company’s rubbish. “I was concerned about the amount of waste we generate,” says Phillips’s London managing director, Rodman Primack, who teamed up with British adventurer and environmentalist David de Rothschild to find ways the firm could recycle its catalogues, crates, cardboard and bubble wrap. The solution arose from Primack’s own love of birds. Prototypes for the houses are slated to be offered at a onetime auction at Phillips this summer, with the goal of eventually producing them for museum stores. Says Primack, “I’m hoping to have all three in my garden.”

"Gloss Houses" originally appeared in the February 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's February 2008 Table of Contents.