Rosie and Andrew Bogle scour exotic destinations for treasure and display their finds at home for their grateful customers.
If any of us were to design the perfect life, it could go something like this: live in a light-filled house beside the sea, travel to hot sunny countries during the miserable winter months, rummage in markets, bazaars and artisans' homes buying beautiful pieces and meet interesting people, eat local food and live life at a local pace. Then come home, sell the wonderful finds to fund trip, keep the gems. Repeat.
Talk to dealers Andrew and Rosie Bogle and it is hard not to come away with the impression that they have just about cracked the secret to creating a seamless melding of work and life, in a way that keeps them afloat and, most importantly, feeds their passions.
Andrew was the head of international contemporary art at the Auckland Art Gallery for 20 years before leaving in 1996 to set up business with his wife. Rosie laughs she has had a mixed career, but her passion has always been textiles, costume and homewares.
Called Tribal & Tribal, their company brings together collectable textiles, artwork and crafts from Indonesia's Bali and Sumba Island, India - including tiny northern states Sikkim and Nagaland on the borders of Nepal and Burma - Thailand, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma and Mexico. The couple head out of New Zealand in June, base themselves in the town of Ubud in Bali for a couple of months and make extended forays into Southeast Asia and India, sourcing products to sell at private exhibitions from their home by the sea in Pt Chevalier.
"We only do a few exhibitions a year, otherwise we find if we squeeze so much in, people get overwhelmed and can't see anything," explains Rosie.
The pair has built up a database over the years to these invitation-only exhibitions, and have found that customers have become friends who delight in seeing pieces displayed in a domestic setting rather than crammed on ordinary shop shelves.
It helps that their curatorial skills are well-honed: when Viva called, Andrew had just finished hanging a wall of tiny but diverse pictures from all over their patch of the world, making the colours and patterns sing in an Asia-meets-Richard Killeen kind of installation. Their fridge displays a host of tiny magnetised pictures made up from old Indian matchboxes.
"This is a lifestyle business that enables us to travel," says Andrew. "We don't make a lot of money, we're no Enron, but then again we have survived longer than them. We don't want to be tied to a shop with staff and overheads, here people can visualise things in their own home. There are things for a few dollars, things for thousands of dollars."
Rosie admits the uniqueness of their house has enabled their lifestyle. The house is one of a row on the walkway on the beach, converted by architects Marshall Cook and Jen Cook (no relation) from former holiday houses 18 years ago. By good luck or good fortune, it suits their travelling/exhibiting life perfectly: its wide open gallery-like upper floor and smaller shelf-lined bedroom and study on the ground floor convert perfectly from home to selling space, while the house's spectacular location means that they have no trouble letting it while they travel in the winter. Tenants are often film crews and the like on six-month leases, so if timings clash the Bogles can also camp at their bach near Kawhia.
Like many people in the flower power 60s and 70s, Andrew and Rosie backpacked through India, exploring Afghanistan and Nepal. They brought back a few shirts to sell, but then real life got in the way. Andrew had a career at the Art Gallery, they brought up children.
"But India stayed with us all that time," says Rosie. "We went back in 1987 and we've been going back regularly ever since. Now it is probably twice a year. When we bought into this house it was pretty scary, we didn't have the money to play around if it turned to custard. But that decision has enabled our lifestyle now."
"We just love fossicking, we are doing it because we enjoy ourselves, money isn't the objective," adds Andrew. "The idea was that we would sell enough to subsidise the pieces we were collecting. There are the things we don't want to part with, so that at the end of the exhibition we can pick and choose what we like for ourselves."
The Bogles make it sound so easy, but in their 23 years of "fossicking" they have developed close relationships with crafts people and merchants. Their curator and textile-lover eyes are finely honed - they know regions, they know appropriate colours and quality.
As they show Viva their finds, they quickly flick to well-thumbed art books or catalogues from international exhibitions which explain the provenance and quality of the pieces.
They still have the thrill of the chase and serendipitous finds that set the heart beating.
This year it was turning up to a warehouse the very week a merchant had taken a shipment of immaculately stitched vintage bedspreads from Bengal. "A week earlier, or a week later, they wouldn't have been there," marvels Rosie.
A set of painted glass-fronted kitchen cabinets found in a dusty shop (more are on the seas from India for their exhibition early in the New Year) displays fresh-out-of-the-box vintage enamel bowls from the Czech Republic. Again, a day later they could have been gone.
The couple are conscious that a lot of what they are buying is supporting entire households, even villages, that women and girls stitching and working (often reworking old scraps) are keeping crafts and traditions alive that may otherwise have withered.
Already they are noting a westernisation of some of the tradtional textile colours or designs, overhearing business conversations in their favourite cafes in Bali's Ubud, spotting middle-aged American tourists clutching their copies of Eat, Pray, Love.
At times it can seem like every interior designer from Australia is commissioning furniture from their Bali workshops (but, they hasten to add, the quality of the work is superb).
Indeed, the Bogles have commissioned one of the carvers they work with to create a series of New Zealand native birds, dotterels and stilts, detailed and perfect in the beachside setting.
"We could keep going at this until we are 80," declares Andrew. "It is an adventure for us to go to these places and see these beautiful things."
The perfect life plan, then.
* To join the Tribal & Tribal mailing list email artwork@ihug.co.nz or phone (09) 8152581
Mob (021) 747114. Exhibitions on Saturday and Sunday, December 18 and 19, with more in January and February.
