Tire Planters Are A Nod To The History Of The Christie's Southampton Building

Landscape architect and Southampton Village resident Perry Guillot passes by Christie’s Southampton, a fine art gallery now in its second summer in an Art Deco former auto shop, five or six times a day.

It occurred to him that he could come up with a plan to liven the plaza out front, and he offered his services.

In an interview last week, he recalled telling Bonnie Brennan, the president Of Christie’s Americas: “It’s a highly, highly visual corner. I think you could do something different, something better, maybe.”

Guillot, whose credits include the renovation of the White House Rose Garden, said he wanted to help Christie’s and to participate in something he thought would be fun.

“I got to know them a little bit on another project,” he said of Christie’s. “And I just offered to say, ‘I think he could do better with the front plaza there.’ And that’s how this evolved. They hired me to have a look at it.”

Previously, there were teak wood boxes there with a “floral bit of, in my words, nonsense,” Guillot said. “I don’t want to demean someone else’s work, but it favored the more decorative kind of cottage planting; you know, a bit at odds with that building.”

Guillot set about creating a concept that would introduce nature to the plaza while at the same time referencing the history of the building. He said it had been a mechanic shop, car dealership, gas station and tire repair place all wrapped up into one.

His idea was to use recycled tires to provide that link to the past. For the flowers, he picked what are called “gas station plants,” in another nod to the building’s former uses. Specifically, he chose a marigold variety called Bonanza Yellow.

“It’s called a gas station plant because they’re so reliable,” he noted. “They are often placed in full-sun conditions, and they have a very bright, bright color.”

Further, Guillot pointed out that yellow is a complementary color to blue, which is the color of the horizontal bands that run across the facade of the Christie’s building.

The yellow and blue reference the sharp, bright, clean colors of the Pop Expressionists of the 1960s and ’70s, mostly Roy Lichtenstein who happened to live less than half a mile away, Guillot said.

The yellow stands out even more encircled in the white-painted tires.

Guillot said that he took tires, which had an earlier existence at the location and have an “honest utility,” and made them into decorative objects. The tires were donated by S&M Tire Recycling, based in Oceanside outside Kennedy Airport.

“The link was that the building went through the same transformation of something that was highly utilitarian as a mechanic shop, and its own transformation into a fine art gallery,” he explained. “So they both went through this sort of metamorphosis into being more decorative, and there’s a brotherhood link to that transformation.”

He said he’s gotten funny comments about the tires but those who understand the history of the building smile.

To better understand that history himself, he went through files at the Southampton History Museum’s Rogers Mansion with the museum’s archivist, Mary Cummings, and found old photos dating back as far as the 1890s, when 1 Pond Lane was the site of a farmhouse, and later photos depicting when it became host to the Art Deco gas station. In several of the images, 1 Pond Lane is spotted behind the photo’s main focus, Monument Square, which is in fact inside a triangle formed by Pond Lane, Jobs Lane and Hill Street.

“What sort of wins you over is that the Monument Square — where the cannons and the flagpole are — hasn’t changed one iota,” Guillot said.

As part of his presentation to Christie’s, he drew a link between “the humble marigold as an annual bedding plant” to the much more elaborate bedding plants on Monument Square, including Salvia and Ageratum.

“Both are Victorian in their inspiration and early use in America as bedding plants of highly articulated shapes,” he said.