The Lalannes’ work has always been difficult to find—an appealing quality for committed collectors, Krakoff admits. “It’s only human nature to be enticed by something you already love when it’s scarce,” he says, noting that the Lalannes tend to work in very small editions, of six to eight, and that their creations are often commissioned by intensely private people who love them too much to sell.

Prices for the pieces that do come to market are begin beginning to escalate. Last December a Sotheby’s auction of 20 lots of furniture commissioned for the Lila Acheson Wallace Garden in Colonial Williamsburg, estimated at $185,000, fetched an astonishing $1,114,000. In June three sheep went for $180,000, more than four times the original estimate.

“The Lalannes are part of a general rediscovery of the 1970s, but there’s more to them than that,” says James Zemaitis, director of Sotheby’s 20th-century-design department. “There’s a deepseated naturalism to their work, an enchanting quality not dissimilar to that of American postwar craft by people like Wendell Castle and George Nakashima that is all really hot right now.” This month, a brass-and-copper stamped hippopotamus made in 1969 by François-Xavier Lalanne is up for sale at Sotheby’s with a $150,000–$200,000 estimate.

As for Krakoff, he’s taken the next step in the evolution of a serious collector and begun commissioning pieces: In addition to the sheep and the crocodile chairs, he is now working with the Lalannes on some mirrors and chandeliers for his new Manhattan home. And he’s wielding the power of Coach and of his own formidable reputation as a trendsetter to champion his interests in more concrete ways. The exhibition at the Paul Kasmin Gallery, for instance, is cosponsored by Coach and has a catalogue published by Krakoff himself. “Doing a show is really the greatest way for me to learn about the artists,” says Krakoff, who two years ago helped organize an exhibition and publish a catalogue on the London-based designer Ron Arad at New York’s Barry Friedman Gallery. Meanwhile, Krakoff is only slightly anxious about an impulse buy he made that magical afternoon in the Lalannes’ garden: a five-foot-tall cast-iron baboon with a wood-burning stove inside its belly. “I don’t know yet where I am going to put it,” he says. “But I’ll figure it out as soon as I have my hands on it.”

 

"Animal Instincts" originally appeared in the December 2006 issue of Art+Auction.