objets d’heart

Carly is talking museums and… exaltation?

“Growing up I went to this show, Sultans of the Ottoman Emperor Empire at the Hammer. I just remember thinking it was the most magical thing I’d ever experienced.”

Not to put too fine a point on it, but for 11-year-old Carly the visit was transformative. “For me a museum was a sacred space, almost like a cathedral. You go in and there’s this elevation of the spirit. A cathedral is designed do that. And I think a museum offers a similar reverence for the created thing.” 

And so we come to Pippin. The word has about it a certain phonetic lilt, a breezy suggestion of buoyancy. For all that, “Pippin” also carries historical gravity. In 768, Pippin was the firstborn of towering historical figure Charlemagne; first Holy Roman Emperor, King of the Franks, and by broad historical consensus the Father of Modern Europe. No big deal. Charlemagne’s kid likely didn’t guess that some 1,200 years in the future (far-flung 1973) he would capture the imagination of composer Stephen Schwartz (Wicked) and get his own Broadway musical, the eponymous Pippin, whose themes explore everyday wonder and the simple power of human connection. 

These rarely combined elements – deep European cultural history and a Tony Award-winning Bob Fosse musical – go hand in glove with the Pippin of this essay; both the energized Carly Pippin, and the place that bears her name. Pippin is a daydream with a door (if that helps), in effect a wholly imported European flea market in the La Arcada promenade. To strip away still more of the vernis décoratif, Pippin is an antique gallery, but in the same way the Eiffel Tower is a radio antenna. The noun is accurate but insufficient. 

“I love the history of French design,” Carly says. “France is very much the guiding North Star as far as my aesthetic. But I love Italy, I love Spain, I love England. They all have beautiful craftsmanship in history.” With a smile of polite surrender, she pivots back to La Belle France. “I could go to France every year for the rest of my life and just love it,” she says. “So the shop is very French forward.” I’d mentioned in early correspondence the Frankish provenance of Carly’s surname. She happily embraced the inference. “Oh, I’m definitely in the camp that I’m probably long-lost French royalty,” she wrote in reply.

voyageur frequent

Pippin is located adjacent to the storied Turtle Fountain in La Arcada Plaza, and is in effect a walk-in treasury of Carly’s wide-ranging discoveries. She is a restless sort driven by an informed love of beauty; of those radiant objects that move through time, gathering accumulated affection and energy from every thoughtful, admiring stare, every pair of hands that, over centuries in some cases, have lovingly buffed away a smudge or hefted a piece by wavering lamplight. Carly has her resources. 

“The model of travelling to France and sourcing in France is definitely what I do. I visit a couple of times a year and bring things home. But I also shop domestically. There are some great antique shows in America. Round Top is an excellent one in Texas. Round Top is this tiny town of ninety people. Twice a year a hundred thousand people descend onto it for miles and miles of antiques.” She summarizes with a smile. “I shop wherever a treasure can be found. And every time I do a sourcing trip I’ll have a… they call it a drop. I’ll have a big drop event.” 

There is one stop on the Continent, though, that may be considered antique central, a place where the markets often receive an inflow of antique goods from greater Europe generally. 

“On this most recent trip I went to Paris and went to the weekend flea markets that are just always happening in Paris. I carry things in the store from all other places too, but I think I design with the French feel in mind.” She describes the rigid business metric she applies when considering an item for Pippin. “Does it feel like you could be in France? Does this object feel like it could be in a French house or in the French country?” 

récit des origins

Carly Pippin may curate her shop’s inventory by “feel,” but these intuitions are not completely free-floating. It’s worth noting that Carly is not the “student” whose academics led her to self-revelation; her early passions compelled her to learn all she could about the stuff that mesmerized her. Carly was, of course, formed in the Pippin homestead.

“I grew up in a very artistic household,” she says. “My mom was an artist and a jewelry designer and a painter. She can do anything, yeah. And then my dad, he worked in the business landscape but absolutely loves music. He’s a rock star guitarist.”

I’m beginning to get the drift, though I may well have guessed at Carly’s right-brain provenance given her emotional connection to history’s human breadth and depth. She took these predilections to class, and of course to the Museum.

“At Pepperdine I was I was a humanities major, art history minor. I had thought about working in the museum world and that all made sense. But I wasn’t sure yet how that was going to unfold. But when I graduated, I went to Washington D.C. and got two internships. One at the Smithsonian’s Museums of Asian Art, and at the United States Navy Museum. And then within two months I was hired at the Smithsonian. One thing led to another and it was amazing.” Several years in, she pursued and received an MBA at Georgetown University, later returning to California and working with the Getty Foundation. That is, having immersed herself in antiquity itself, she next honed her business sense. What on Earth was she thinking? “I wanted a shop. But it was never something that I thought would actually happen.”

It happened. Though surely in a less passive form than that limp little sentence suggests. She is so positively enamored of the objet voyageant dans le temps, it would seem to speak to her love of… life? – and the warm beings who, through the ages, have inhabited its daily rigors, and share among themselves beloved things. Her shop, Pippin, reflects this. 

“I want the experience here to be very experiential, very transporting,” Carly says. “The people who really connect with my shop are seekers of beauty.”

Parisian Christmas Market

And in the Seasonal Soirée category, Pippin will be hosting a Parisian Christmas Market on Saturday, November 14th, from 11 am to 6 pm. “It’s one day only,” Carly enthuses. “I’m going to be debuting what I got in France from my recent trip. It’ll have all sorts of fun Parisian-esque elements; specialty goods from France, specialty baked goods, and then some local artists as well, which I’m really excited about. We’ll have a collage artist, Diana Arsenian, and then a ceramic artist named Stephanie Rose.

“I really think of my shop as both local and European, local and global. I love the Santa Barbara art scene. I just love that about Santa Barbara, so I celebrate our local art and the old world art of Europe.”

Pippin’s gorgeously timeworn antiques are personally curated by besotted proprietor/frequent flyer Carly Pippin, at domestic and offshore flea markets like the bi-annual Foire de Chatou outside Paris. Her wide-ranging curiosity, intuitive love of lasting beauty, Pepperdine Art History undergrad, several years working at the national museums of Asian Art in Washington D.C., and general infatuation with the wider world – these elements have culminated in Pippin, where the curated past glowingly inhabits the welcoming present. The antique objects in Pippin are totems of the lives they’ve touched. 

“I lean into the beauty aspect unabashedly. It’s also the idea of an object that’s been around for a long time, something that has many lives to it,” Carly says. “And now you’re part of that object’s story. I find the idea romantic.”  

PIPPIN
1114 State St Suite 24, Santa Barbara, CA
805-724-4887 / [email protected]