Spotted this beauty across from the coffee shop this morning. The owner has been working on it for a couple of years. I invited him to name his price. He’s not selling.
Update: New seats and some interior work.
1947 Willys Jeep
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Category Archives: Art/Style/Culture
Vintage Roadster
This little beauty pulled up across the street from my local coffee shop this morning and I had a few words with the owner. Don’t know if restoration is the right term for what happened here because he seemed more in tune with the spirit of the original (at least the original street version) than creating a perfect reproduction. This started out as a four-door!
I was delighted to hear him say he drives this every day and the interior (very cozy) looked nicely lived in.
Universal Theory of Cool
“To sell something surprising, make it familiar. To sell something familiar,, make it surprising.” Some interesting ideas on what makes something cool. Runs 4 min.
Arkonik Custom Land Rover Defender
This morning I heard about Arkonik, a company in the UK that does custom restorations of vintage Land Rovers. I submitted my name and email address on their website and within 5 minutes got a call from Tom Maxwell who might just be the best phone salesman I’ve ever encountered. He talked for half an hour but it was all good stuff. A full-on core dump. Where I could get no information from the Cool & Vintage guys, I got more from Tom than I could process. (D90 below is just a sample image from their website)
It’s becoming clear I’m gonna drop a bundle if I want to own a Land Rover D90. Did I mention the 12 month wait? This is clearly a seller’s market. Much more like buying/investing in fine art than driving a new Prelude off the lot. Or a bespoke suit on Savile Row. Deep water for a small town boy like me. But I’m hooked. Unless I get unhooked. From the jump Tom (and others) have stressed how much are and attention a 25 year old vehicle demands. It’s really more like buying a Golden Retriever than a truck. So why the hell is the Defender worth so much?
“I’ll tell you why: because it’s so damn cool. Yes, it’s loud, and rough, and slow, and unreliable. Yes, the Jeep Wrangler is better than the Defender in every objective way. But that’s the point of the Defender: it’s unique. It’s special. It’s unusual. The Jeep Wrangler is for people who leave their dealership license plate frame on. For people who drive past six gas stations to get to a Texaco two miles from their house because gas there is three cents cheaper.” (Jalopnik)
Stay tuned.
Apple’s New Campus
A few of my favorite excerpts from Steven Levy’s tour of Apple’s new campus.
“Jobs discussed the walls he had in mind for the offices: “He knew exactly what timber he wanted, but not just ‘I like oak’ or ‘I like maple.’ He knew it had to be quarter-cut. It had to be cut in the winter, ideally in January, to have the least amount of sap and sugar content. We were all sitting there, architects with gray hair, going, ‘Holy shit!’”
“At first, we had no idea what Steve was actually talking about with these pods. But he had it all mapped out: a space where you could concentrate one minute and then bump into another group of people in the next,” Behling says.”
“To withstand earthquakes, the Ring is mounted on huge steel base isolators that ensure the building can move up to 4.5 feet in any direction without losing its vital services.”
“The very toughest challenge came from constructing the giant glass sliding doors for the café—they had to extend from the ground to the roof, a full four stories. Each door leaf is about 85 feet by 54 feet. “The only doors I know of in the world that size are on an airplane hangar,” Diller says.”
“It’s not like we’re asking people to be uncomfortable at work,” she says. “We’re asking them to recognize that part of being connected to the outside is knowing what temperature it is. We don’t want you to feel like you’re in a casino. We want you to know what time of day it is, what temperature it is outside. Is the wind really blowing? That was Steve’s original intention, to sort of blur that line between the inside and outside. It sort of wakes up your senses.”
“We just imagine what we want next and we build it”
That is how Ricardo Pessoa — the founder of Cool & Vintage — decides which cars to restore. I found several interviews and articles about Ricardo and his company.
“We are a couple of creative guys that have marketing/photography/fashion/filmmaking backgrounds and this is our take on cars. We were already dealing with restorations since we were driving mainly classic cars in our everyday life. We try to create the environment that will inspire people to use the cars, whether you buy it from us or not. The concept behind the company is to enjoy life through experiences and cars do that for us because we love to travel by car.”
That works for me. As does this:
“The new generation doesn’t want to buy from big, mainstream companies — they’re selective and look for small businesses who really care about their product and have a brand they can connect with”, comments Founder Ricardo Pessoa.
I’ve found lots of photos of the cars and the workshop but none of Ricardo yet. I’ll see if I can get one of him and the boys with “my” Land Rover.
Land Rover D90
UPDATE: (May 17, 2017) After two weeks of struggling to get email and phone calls returned, I’ve decided to look elsewhere for my Land Rover D90. The folks at Cool & Vintage are talented marketers and they’re probably pretty good at restoring Land Rovers, but I found their communication skills wanting.
Regardless of how it ends, I’ll probably mark today as the beginning of my Land Rover D90 adventure. It really started last week when spotted a nifty looking vehicle on one of the websites I frequent. They had linked to www.CoolVintage.com’s photo spread of a restored vintage Land Rover (D90). I’ve always liked the looks of these but never gave a thought to owning one but that day I filled out the webform (“Will I have to rob a liquor store to purchase one of these?”)I promptly received an email from Francisca, the Product Manager at Cool Vintage.com.
Turns out the Land Rover with the hot model is not available for export to US but they were restoring a few D90’s that would be ready in September. I fell in love with the 1993 D90 in Nardo Grey with Rugged Interior Trim. I finally got the company founder, Ricardo, on the phone today and while “my” car is still being restored, he promised to send me some photos next week. (This is where you take a few minutes to limber up your eyeballs because you’re gonna want to roll ‘em in a few seconds.)
According to Francisca, I send them 60% of the money up front and the remainder when the car arrives. If this goes down it will probably be my largest online purchase for a while. I’ve already answered a few questions from friends: Can’t you get one of these in the US? Can’t you get one cheaper? Are you out of your fucking mind? Have you thought this through?
No to that last question. Total impulse buy. I fell in love with the look of this car and the idea of some some guys/girls in a garage in Lisbon, Portugal, restoring a vintage Land Rover from the ground up. (“Everything either restored or new down to the last bolt. Probably better than new.” Says Francisca.)
I’ll chronicle this adventure here if you want to following along. Photos next week. And I’ll try to find out a bit more about Francisca and Ricard and CoolVintage.com
UPDATE: I’ve never tried so hard to send a bunch of money to strangers in a foreign country. It is not certain I will be able to purchase one of these. A very “tough ticket.”
Swedish-based artist Simon Stålenhag
I love the work of Swedish-based artist Simon Stålenhag. I’ve shared some of his stuff here before. This one brings to mind the apartment building for the 21st century. Would love to know what inspired the artist.
“sT. aNNS” by Aaron Groen
“Aaron J. Groen is an artist specializing in astro and landscape photography. He was born and raised in South Dakota and spent his entire life exploring the beauty and wonder of the midwest. Traveling the back roads and gravels where most people do not travel. Constantly in search of that next spot to shoot that perfect moment in time. Aaron loves South Dakota’s amazing night skies and things that seem to be left behind by mankind. You can see much more of Aaron’s photography on his Flickr site.”
Hat tip to Margaret — tumblr junkie, art & photography lover, admirer of good coffee, two boxers dog owner, wife and mother.
Man Photoshops himself into movie posters
