Before an old velvet chair became part of Ruby, she got one afternoon in the desert.
I had been looking for a chair.
Not just any chair, which would have made things considerably easier.
I wanted something tall enough to hold its own on camera, distinctive enough to become recognizable, comfortable enough to actually sit in, and strange enough to feel at home in the world of Ruby. I looked at new chairs made to look old. I looked at actual old chairs. I looked at chairs that were almost right, chairs that were too short, chairs that were too ordinary, and at least one that made me wonder whether buying something new might somehow be easier than finding the right vintage piece and reupholstering it.
Then, as these things often happen, Facebook Marketplace coughed up a chair that looked promising.
It was gold.
Not tasteful little brass-accent gold. Not beige masquerading as gold.
Gold-gold.
Crushed velvet. Tall fan-shaped back. Dark wooden arms and legs. Nailhead trim. The kind of chair that looked as though it had opinions about proper hosiery and might have once lived beside a bowl of hard candies nobody was allowed to eat.
I had to see it in person.
The woman selling it was older and preparing to move from her home into a smaller apartment. She was warm and sweet (even though I knew she was judging me for wearing sweatpants to pick the chair up haha), and before I arrived she had taken the time to clean the chair and vacuum it.
That detail stayed with me.
There are certain tiny acts of care that are so ordinary they would be easy to miss. She was parting with a piece of furniture she no longer needed, yet she still made sure it was ready for the person coming to take it home.
I sat down.
That was it.
The chair was comfortable. The proportions were right. The wood was prettier in person than it had looked in the listing. The fan-back detail that had caught my attention in photos was even better up close.
I paid her $60 for the chair, loaded it into the car, and somewhere on the drive home it became clear that this ridiculous old gold thing had found exactly where it was supposed to go. It was one of the rare times when I knew that in adding her to the world of Ruby, I was doing exactly the right thing.
She became Grandma Gold.
Naturally.
Before
Grandma Gold was never going to remain gold forever.
The plan from the beginning was to reupholster her in a saturated warm green, preserve the fan-back channels and the shape that made her interesting in the first place, and refinish the exposed wood rather than disguise it. Eventually she’ll live with Ruby in an entirely different form.
But once I got her home, I realized I didn’t want to erase the first version without documenting her.
She had been somebody else’s chair for years before she was mine. There were worn places in the velvet, changes in the nap where hands and bodies had brushed against it, little signs of use that no amount of vacuuming could remove.
I liked that.
So before the upholstery came off and before the gold disappeared, Grandma Gold needed a portrait.
Actually, she needed several.
The Desert
On the afternoon we photographed her, the clouds were spectacular.
The kind of Nevada sky that makes you reconsider whatever responsible plans you had for the day because suddenly there is only one obvious thing to do: put an antique velvet chair in the car and drive it into the desert.
We went off-roading to find the perfect location.
Against the rock, scrub, mountains, and enormous blue sky, Grandma Gold looked completely absurd.
Which is precisely why she looked right.
The crushed gold velvet caught the late-afternoon light and changed every few minutes. In some photographs it looks mustard and worn. In others it becomes almost molten. The wood glowed. The little nailheads became visible. From a distance she looked stately and completely out of place; up close you could see every wrinkle and impression in the fabric.
We photographed her straight on.
From the side.
From behind.
Close enough to see the grain of the wood and the crushed velvet.
Far enough away that she became a tiny gold punctuation mark in several miles of desert.
And then, of course, I sat in her.
There is something especially funny about looking composed while sitting in a sixty-dollar Facebook Marketplace chair that you just hauled across rocks for a glamour shoot.
The clouds behaved beautifully.
Grandma Gold did too.
The Back of the Chair
One of my favorite photographs from the afternoon isn’t particularly glamorous.
It’s the back.
You can see the irregular marks in the velvet where it has been brushed and vacuumed. You can see its age. You can see that it has been used.
It made me think again about the woman I bought it from.
She didn’t know what I planned to do with the chair. She didn’t know it would end up in the desert a few days later being photographed from every conceivable angle. She certainly didn’t know it would acquire a name.
She just knew someone was coming to take something she had owned, and she cleaned it first.
That is such a small thing.
It is also exactly the kind of thing I don’t want to forget.
Objects have a funny way of carrying evidence of the people who had them before us. Not in some grand, mystical sense. Just in the quiet physical record of being used and cared for. A polished arm. A softened cushion. Vacuum marks in old velvet.
Grandma Gold arrived with some of that still intact.
I’m glad I photographed it before changing anything.
What Happens Next
Soon, the gold velvet will go.
The silhouette will stay. The fan-back channels will stay. The wood will still be visible. But the chair itself will become something entirely different, dressed in deep green and beginning another chapter inside Ruby.
I’m excited about that version.
Very excited, actually.
But I’m also glad there was a moment between finding her and changing her.
A moment when she was still exactly as I found her.
Gold. Worn. A little eccentric, like me.
Cleaned carefully by the woman who owned her before me.
And sitting, for one afternoon, in the middle of the Nevada desert under an absolutely ridiculous sky.
Long live Grandma Gold. 💛
