Words Tony Moxham  Photographs Guzman

Originally published in No 9

There’s Never A Dull Moment In The World Of Jason Jacques

People will tell you there are right ways and wrongs ways to go about buying and decorating a home. There are magazines and television shows devoted to convincing you fear should govern one’s decorating impulses and you’ll always be happier in the end if you err on the side of less rather than more. And there’s Marie Kondo, who just wants you to throw your stuff away. At its highest level, taste is like anything else at its peak. It can be difficult to look at, difficult to turn away from, elitist and a little hardcore, much like gymnastics or a really good fashion show. Good taste elicits a response different to that of good decor, which usually aims to relax rather than challenge. The home of the Jacques family is both an assault on good decor and a testament to good taste. Jason Jacques, best known for his eponymous uptown Manhattan ceramic gallery, has spent his adult life in the pursuit of some of the world’s most beautiful objects. And while his home in upstate New York might, at first glance, resemble a meth lab from a cartoon, to eyes trained in the decorative arts it’s a peacock of a house. There’s admittedly a lot of look going on, but in a very good way. 

Jacques bought his house around sixteen years ago when he was on the verge of buying a Manhattan apartment he was less than excited about. The one-bedroom flat in a neighborhood he calls “up there, way up there,” had good bones and was in a pre-war building. While being a little “stinky,” buying it also seemed, at the time, like the right thing to do as an adult. But lack of enthusiasm at the thought of this becoming his reality gave him pause. 

Meanwhile, his friend, design eccentric Joseph Holtzman, had a large property in Ghent, NY, which he had purchased for a similar price, yet it afforded twenty acres of land and two separate houses. A consultation with an upstate real estate agent only frustrated Jason further when a search yielded only the types of homes you see on reality television: “poorly made American country houses, hoarder houses with leaky roofs,” he recalls. Frustrated, he talked his way into checking the agent’s folder of properties and set his eyes on a photo of a door, deciding this was exactly what he wanted. And upon viewing the property in person, his hunch was confirmed after he found himself face to face with a wishing well in front of what he could only describe as a “hobbit cabin.” 

While it may not appear obvious, almost every aspect of this home is bespoke, like the life of its owner. Jacques, from Chicago, got his start in the rarified world of antique dealing at an early age, in part due to a competitive instinct that made him a great flea-market sleuth, in part out of a very real love for what he was dealing, and in part, he admits, because of psychedelics. 

Much like Sam Wagstaff did when he began collecting and trading antique photography in the 1970s, when it was considered little more than a technical aid to more serious art or the stuff of snapshots, Jacques began his career trading historic 19th-century European ceramics when there was little zeitgeist or appreciation for these types of vessels. 

For Wagstaff, his realization of photography’s importance came while viewing a pair of Steichen’s famous Flatiron Building photos at the Met’s The Painterly Photo show, in 1973, with boyfriend Robert Mapplethorpe. For Jacques that realization also hit when he was in a new relationship, which led him to Paris in 1989. He had been working part-time for his best friend’s father, a U.S. antique dealer, but in Paris, with little to do, he roamed flea markets for 19th and 20th-century decorative ceramics. 

After sending a roll of film back to the antique shop featuring the pieces he’d found, he received a shocked call from his friend who begged him to buy them all. “We got to the airport on the subway, we didn't have enough money for taxis after buying all these ceramics,” recalls Jacques with a laugh. After returning to the U.S., he sold the pieces to his friend who quickly re-sold all of them at an exorbitant mark-up to store clients, gave Jason a token $100 tip for his work, and then promptly never spoke to him again. 

Jacques became known as a wunderkind for his ability to truffle out 19th and 20th-century decorative ceramics in flea markets and obscure estates ahead of other collectors and he became almost the stuff of legend. And like what Wagstaff achieved with photography — a new respect for the medium as art — the ceramic work championed by Jacques would eventually find its way into top museums, private collections, and finally into the history of modern art itself. “I reintroduced art nouveau ceramics to the world,” he recalls, “and put them back in their proper place in history, and I had a lot of fun with it. I like to consider ceramics of the 19th century to be the Western art pottery renaissance, because ceramics were rarely considered art in Western culture until then. These new objects weren't meant to be used, they were vases or vessels that were more like little sculptures. It opened the door to 20th-century ceramic culture becoming an artistic expression.” 

The Jacques family home demonstrates interior design at a macro-level and is perhaps best appreciated as a collection rather than a house with any arching overall look. Jason is less interested in the overall picture and more into his stuff. But like Elvis Presley’s famous “nothing” sandwich of peanut butter, banana and bacon, it’s a sum greater than its parts. What’s truly fascinating about the family’s house is that, for all its eccentricity, it’s not entirely out of place among its rural neighbors. What Jacques has created, at first glance, looks like many American homes, which play host to proud menageries of collected tchotchkes, trinkets and memories. The contents of the house ultimately usurp any idea of cohesive interior design. “I don't know that I have good taste,” says Jason. “I certainly have a taste. My wife has never been totally thrilled with my choices. I'm the more-is-more type. I'm very micro. I zoom in, and the overall thing is less interesting to me. We built a pot vault, which is my room for my hoard. It’s a literal treasure vault. So here I am, a dragon with my treasures.”

The stuff doesn’t stop at the pot vault, though. The entrance of the main house is flanked by a pair of exotic wooden figures of a style you’d more likely see in a tiki bar than a museum collection. Jacques had the stairway to his basement painted to resemble an Egyptian tomb, bringing to mind eccentric Hollywood producer Allan Carr’s fearlessly custom, Egyptian-themed, basement disco of the late seventies, or a dead end in a haunted house. “I had this crazy tattoo artist living up there painting stuff. He needed a place to stay and some work and he said to me, ‘I think you need a crypt downstairs.’ And I said, ‘I think you're right.’ And he said, ‘Permission to make a crypt?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, permission granted’” 

Similar touches adorn almost every flat surface of the house. He remedied not being able to afford an historic stone house by painting stone over the exterior’s wood, a bathroom is covered in mesmerizing Moroccan encaustic tile, a side table resembling a bunch of alien debris is actually a piece by new and important Detroit designer Chris Schanck. Many of the home’s walls are decorated with scenes from Maurice Sendak’s famous Where The Wild Things Are. “It’s my favorite book,” states Jason simply. Why not, then? There’s a baby dinosaur sculpture in the kitchen, which, despite this, is dominated by one continuous countertop that wouldn’t be out of place in a home designed by Zaha Hadid. 

Just like other country residents whose menageries and collections are proudly on display, Jacques’s curated passions are visible everywhere you turn. “I tried to not spend too much money but make it fun,” says Jason. “There’s a high level of craft with real lowbrow material. In the first ten years it was just a hangout. It was a crazy place, pig roasts and dirt bikes. We sleep, shower and dress in the small house. After our daughter Aya was born, we built two big king beds into the living room of the main house, so all five of us can just crash whenever we don't feel like going to the small house. We have a very free way of dealing with it. If it's cold we sleep here, if we have guests over we sleep there.” 

Later this year Jacques will be opening a second gallery space on the Bowery, in downtown Manhattan, where he hopes to focus even more heavily on the stable of contemporary artists, as well as exhibiting two-dimensional work. “2010 was when I hit the ceiling on the antiques side and started the contemporary program. All the dream pieces, the masterpieces I'd already possessed at one time or another,” he says. 

“You could go to a flea market on a Friday morning and you wouldn't know what you'd find, but then the Internet happened and the adventure was over. And so, what I did was apply the same rules to contemporary artists that I applied to the historical artist. First was mastery, mastery of the material. Working with clay, you have to do it for a long period of time to become great at it, because it's not an easy material to work with. Then it had to have an innate beauty. I wanted quality and excitement. This last year we added Bethany Cavanaugh and Kim Simonsson. Kim is insane. He works like Rodin or Claudel, he’s a sculptor who works in clay, but he's flocking them, and flocking obviously comes from design, out of wallpaper. It's interesting because his work appeals to a cross section. 

“I'll also be doing this photography exhibition (downtown) with NASA photographs from the lunar landings. They’re the first photos transmitted from space. They were such high resolution they would make low-res press images because the Americans didn't want the Russians to know how good they were doing back then (laughs).” 

Learn more at jasonjacques.com

Tony Moxham’s artisanal Mexican design work for DFC and MT Objects: @mtobjects  @totaldfc Guzman are regular contributors to UD @lesguzman They are repped by Veronique Peres Domergue