This Purple Fan Is $20 and a Verifiable Objet d’Art
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In a recent issue ofNew Yorkmagazine,Design Huntingwent to the Catskills, where musicianEleanor Friedbergerlives withartistMichael Berryhill. The couple’s Ulster County home is the kind of eclectic, cozily furnished house you might dream of having upstate: an Yves Klein–blue kitchen, forest-green marble countertops, a circular shelving niche packed with mismatchedceramics, a retro-flower-wallpaperedbathroomwith Pepto-pink tiles, and plenty of brightly colored accent chairs throughout. But one thing in their home really caught our eye: a purple box fan. Unassumingly utilitarian yet shockinglypurple, thefanlooked as meticulously chosen as the canary-yellow rug beater hung just so against the kitchen’s blue walls. As design editor Wendy Goodman said after the shoot, “I am obsessed with that purple fan.”
Wanting to know more about this charming purple fan, we called up Friedberger. It turns out that thefan, which looks like it could be from the MoMA Design Store, has a much humbler origin: Walmart. “I spotted it in the display aisle. It was a Lasko, it turned out — I had one in white when I was in my 20s and didn’t have enough money for an air conditioner. When I saw the blades were purple, too, I thought,Wow, Lasko’s really doing something kind of special and cool here.The blue and the purple versions are really saturated.” When she got home and unboxed thefan, it was perfect but for one flaw: “It’s almost an absolutely perfect object except that they skimmed to save a few bucks and the handle and the dial are white. I personally would have paid twice as much for it if it had a purple handle and dial.”
Matching knobs and handles or not, the fan effectively cools the spaciousliving roomjust as well as the ceiling fans do in other rooms,and it has become a focal point. “I can’t think of another $20 object that is that useful and that capable of holding a space,” says Friedberger.
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