In 2001, Ray Azoulay opened Obsolete (see here) in a small sliver of storefront in Venice, California. It has since expanded significantly and relocated to Culver City. Before Obsolete, Ray worked in men’s fashion at a major department store, where he oversaw the design and development of dozens of clothing lines and, in turn, thousands of pieces per season. In many ways, Obsolete couldn’t be more of a departure. It is, after all, the ultimate palate cleanser. It’s the sort of space that, within minutes, can inspire you to overthrow your entire design sensibility, strip your living room bare, and begin again. “I’m always surprised when someone actually buys something,” he explains. “I just play in here—I see my responsibility as a curator to motivate and inspire, not so much to sell.”
When you enter the store, you are immediately struck by the fact that it feels like another time, another place, and another universe. For one, each room and each vignette is pieced together like it’s a movie set. But the mix of furniture, art, and objects is so varied and far-flung that it establishes itself as its own period. In one small corner you’ll see a lighting fixture from the ’70s hung above a santo from the nineteenth century, on a farm table from the ’20s, sitting below a drawing completed last week. “I wanted to create a place where art and objects could exist together in one space where there’s no obvious context,” Ray explains. “That way you have to acknowledge an object for what it is, rather than as a ‘decorative’ side table from the 1900s that goes with an étagère from the same period. This is about shaking up convention and letting a conversation happen with objects from a vast continuum of time.” And those objects do not need to be fancy. “The necessities of the past are now the luxuries of the future,” he explains. “Like a fountain pen today—that’s a real luxury.” Translated to Obsolete, the most utilitarian farm table, beaten up by decades of hard use, looks more like a shrine. “I see the future through the past.” That is not to say he can read your fortune if you ask him to, and I realize that now.