Curious Collectors

Angus Wilkie's Biedermeier

VANITIES

Angus Heights temichian Wilkie's flat is restraint. a study Brooklyn "I in Metlike things that are very pure, very plain, almost chaste," he says, meaning his Biedermeier furniture. The only uncivilized touch is Cukor, his dreadlocked Hungarian sheepdog.

After Yale, Angus spent three years at Salomon Brothers before leaving to open an antiques store on SoHo's Grand Street and write the upcoming book Biedermeier, for Abbeville Press. "Biedermeier was created for a new urban population," Angus explains. "It fits in very well with apartment living today." He points to a boxlike chest with a tamboured front. "It looks like a fifties television console."

He hopes to correct the idea that Biedermeier was strictly bourgeois. "No one was terribly rich in the early nineteenth century," he argues. "I mean, the Archduchess Sophie furnished her drawing room and private quarters in Vienna with Biedermeier furniture, too."

Brooks Peters