Skarstedt has lately been thinking more seriously about bringing design into his gallery program, especially since he moved his operation into a three-story town house on East 79th Street. “We could do a furniture show on the ground floor and an art show upstairs—or mix them, if we wanted to,” he muses. He’s already achieved such a blend in the private third-floor rooms, which he says have the same feel as his home. “It’s so much easier to sell art from there than in the big galleries,” he says. “People can understand how it’s going to look.”

Robert Fitzpatrick, the international managing director of the London-based Haunch of Venison, agrees: “I think it’s far more effective to create a pleasant, welcoming space. It’s a fantastic tool for people to see how they can live with a work.” The gallery’s new Rockefeller Center premises features three private rooms furnished with sleek sofas and tables by Arne Jacobsen, George Nelson and Eero Saarinen in subdued grays and tans.

Uptown from Haunch of Venison is Salon 94, run by Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, who lives just above the gallery with her banker husband, Nicolas, and their three kids. The large living room of the private residence, renovated by Rafael Viñoly in 2002, serves as a viewing area for potential buyers. Artworks by Takashi Murakami, Glenn Brown and Barry X Ball are displayed alongside a spidery metal table and two chairs with lions’ heads for armrests, by the 20th-century Swiss designer Diego Giacometti, and a Viñoly rug with tentaclelike shapes in black, brown, orange and blue against a tan background.

Although the bread and butter of Greenberg Rohatyn’s gallery is work by contemporary artists like the sculptor Huma Bhabha and the painter Marilyn Minter, she also deals in design objects, such as those of the Italian-born Carlo Mollino, whose estate she represents. This past spring, Salon 94 mounted an exhibition of original architecture and furniture from Casa del Sole, Mollino’s chalet in the Italian Alps. She also brought one of the table-and-chair sets—a spare wooden ensemble with graceful lines—from the residence to Art Basel Miami Beach last December, but they weren’t officially for sale. “People would ask me the price, and I would whisper it to them,” she says.

Kenny Schachter has long incorporated design into his contemporary-art program, first in New York and now in London. From the moment he began mounting exhibitions, in the early 1990s, he included furniture by living designers; he has also asked the New York design gallery R 20th Century to loan earlier pieces, from the 1960s–’70s. Throughout his home—an 1840s town house in the Chelsea section of London where he lives with his wife, the fashion designer Ilona Rich, and their four young sons—are objects by the designers he shows, including Zaha Hadid, Tom Dixon, Arik Levy and the Campana brothers. These share space with a cornucopia of contemporary art, including paintings by Benjamin Butler and Peter Saul, sculptures by Donald Baechler and Thomas Hirschhorn and photographs by Katy Grannan and Ryan McGinley.

One thing is certain about dealers who collect design: They don’t coddle their pieces. Harrisburg and Rosenfeld’s two young daughters pull their Nakashima stacking tables up to the couch and eat breakfast on them. Arndt and Wood’s Jack Russell terrier curls up in Jeffrey Bernett’s plush violet Tulip armchair. Lévy’s family keeps odds and ends like stray remote controls in Newson’s Pod of Drawers—one of an edition of 10, not including two artist’s proofs—which she bought from Galerie Kreo soon after it was made, in the late 1980s. Another Pod fetched $1.05 million at Christie’s New York in May 2007, but Lévy wouldn’t even consider selling her version, or any other design object in her collection, let alone dealing in the category. As she puts it, “I am just too passionate.” 

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