As a kid growing up on Long Island, I hated old furniture. My dad dragged me to yard sales every weekend when I wanted to be playing basketball with my friends instead of digging around piles of rusty tools and broken guitars. But he must have planted a seed in my brain, because in my early twenties, while I was studying photography in the Bay Area, I fell in love with the flea markets of Northern California. Back in New York in 2007, when I was working as a production designer on “Wild Combination,” I had a problem: where to keep all of the furniture and props I was collecting for my sets? At first I stowed them in a storage unit in Long Island City, but when that became full, I started putting a few things up on Craigslist, just to clear out space. As word of the finds spread on Apartment Therapy and elsewhere and production wrapped on the movie, I started a blog of my own as a way to catalog the inventory. By the time the first Brooklyn Flea was held, the next spring, I’d begun buying furniture in earnest and kept a booth at the market for its first year.
Sit and Read soon opened a small by-appointment studio on a bleak stretch of industrial Bushwick, Brooklyn, where I began focusing on making better photographs. The light at 333 Scholes was simply amazing (and those floors!), but the Bushwick space was a little too off the beaten path, and Sit and Read eventually found a home in a storefront on Grand Street in Williamsburg.
Around that time, the menswear designer Unis asked me to redesign its flagship store, on Elizabeth Street. I outfitted the Nolita space with pieces from my inventory as well as a series of chairs upholstered in remnant fabrics from past Unis collections. More collaborations with men’s clothing stores followed, along with interior-design and consulting work with individual clients. And the shop expanded, too, with many of Sit and Read’s larger pieces moving to Strawser & Smith, a few blocks away. Strawser & Smith’ s graciousness meant that I was free to turn the Grand Street storefront into a more conceptual space, and so I invited 6 Decades Books, a rare-books business owned by Jeremy Sanders, into the shop. With the addition of 6 Decades, Sit and Read has come full circle from a prop archive to a curated gallery. My dad should be proud.