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Mid-Century Modern, the design aesthetic that's all the rage in Joburg

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Larushka Mare wears a Victor Reed 60-style shift dress, accessorised with a coveted original 60s recliner in her back-to-the-future Linden shop frontPHOTO: garreth-Leigh lombard.
Larushka Mare wears a Victor Reed 60-style shift dress, accessorised with a coveted original 60s recliner in her back-to-the-future Linden shop frontPHOTO: garreth-Leigh lombard.

It’s a bright Saturday morning in Linden and Larushka Mare’s ingenious little store, Retrend, is a paradoxical soirée composed of restrained discernment and thinly veiled consumer panic.

A horde of trendy clients of many colours are glaring guardedly at vases, vintage, I think. Curvy armchairs with spindly little legs; pot plants on three legged stands... Wait, its not vintage, it’s Repro! But, what the hell, I like her.

There are beautiful drinks trolleys. “Too beautiful,” loyal Retrend client Tsepho Mathebane confides later.

“I really have alot. Too many,” says Larushka. There are beige and brown coffee sets and, wait for it, lots of macramé pot holders, heavily knotted and back to knot you! It’s the kind of stuff your tannie used to have and if you’re anything like Larushka or I, you were positively allergic to it – until a few years ago, that is.

But trends are cyclical, and things look different as time passes.

Larushka Mare wears a Victor Reed 60-style shift dress, accessorised with a coveted original 60s recliner in her back-to-the-future Linden shop front Photo: Garreth-Leigh Lombard

For the people

This style, Mid-Century Modern, or MCM, is springing up in the right apartments, restaurants, hotels and in wardrobes. A sizzler to savour before the chain stores cotton on. And what makes Larushka so darn adorable is that a couple of years ago, she’d never heard of it. But she’s a quick learner. The style emerged around the end of World War 2, first by Scandinavian designers and then on a mass scale in pastel-hued America, replacing dour cumbersome pre-war styles with sinuous optimistic shapes that almost floated. Asymmetry, one must remember, is as subversive as treason.

New techniques like wood veneers and plywood; cheery textiles straight out of Archie comics. And yet MCM was also modern in a much more profound and revolutionary way - politically. With the opulence that had long entrenched class barriers now passé, MCM was accessible, affordable and replaceable. Furniture for the people.

Styles evolved until the mid-70s. Ceramics and lamps popped up in daring mustards, bottle greens, browns and oranges – a palette best summed up in a single word: hives.

Collectors began realising the value in designer pieces a few decades back. Gradually the gauche ostentation – okay, palatial 80s extravaganza – imploded, and the accessible, design-focused and understated charm of MCM looked worth revisiting.


Photo: Larushka Mare

Pieces with past lives
Lately, Hollywood has caught on. Films like La La Land and series like The Catch displayed MCM in its glorious new incarnation. Think clean lines and hints of gleaming copper or brass. Demure retro with just a hint of porn-star panache. We may flatter ourselves with the idea that we have totalitarian control over our tastes, but surely we owe some gratitude – or venom – to our backgrounds. The magnetism with which we dive for an orange glass lamp or the disgust with which we flee a chocolate shag rug says it all.

In South Africa in particular, many of us flew so fast out of where we’d been, we couldn’t tell the dust from the dried flower arrangements – only to find ourselves smitten helplessly with nostalgia a few years later.

Sabeeha Mansoor, a way-chic consultant with an Art Deco apartment in Killarney, calculates her MCM household contents ratio at about 70%. The rest are custom made.

She grew up in Pietermaritzburg (surrounded by kitsch 80s and 90s furniture), but recalls that her grandparents had owned a store for over a hundred years, filled with magical MCM pieces. Sabeeha played house in the store growing up.

In hindsight it’s easy (I guess) to understand just why she prefers a pale-pink, spluttering, 60s Remploy radiator to, well, a newer heater. “There’s something very special about pieces that have had past lives. They have layers of personality and most often they’ve stood the test of time.

“I’m not a purist but I can’t see myself living in any other way. We are lucky in South Africa that there’s a fair amount of stock still available at fair enough prices. I don’t regret buying anything.

“My Danish dresser is my absolute favourite. It has hand-crafted legs and its original mirror.” So, the MCM pieces anchor Sabeeha’s apartment and home – and even the woman herself.


Photo: Larushka Mare


The belonging in old things

Over at La Boqueria Togo the hostess has her ear glued to a grey 70s telephone. “Oh dear, I might be able to do something for next Thursday, but I can’t promise,” she says into the handset. Two minutes later I hear the same conversation again. Clearly, La Boq is hotter than a jalapeño salsa at the moment.

Ryan Strubel, one of the owners who trained as an industrial designer, spent a year creating what has proven to be an irresistible foodie haven. For the restaurant, Ryan fetched breeze blocks from Mozambique, and reproduced a range of MCM style seating in deliciously drab vinyls. “It doesn’t have to cost a fortune,” he tells me, “but we thought out of the box, without surrendering a good measure of whimsy.” The bar, comprised of pawpaw orange Post Office boxes
from a bygone age, reminds me where I come from. And somehow I feel a deep sense of belonging in this not-so-bargain restaurant.


 Photos: Garreth-Leigh Lombard


  • You can find Retrend at 64 Sixth Street, Linden. Follow the store’s Instagram feed at @Retrendlinden.
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