Florian Gabrial Estate Sale

Last weekend, I and Tattoo drifted into the estate sale of what ended up being Florian Gabriel's former home. As many know, Florian helped design many of the best Tiki themed restaurants back in the day, from Steven Crane's Luau to the Mauna Loa in Detroit. Unfortunately, Florian past away a little while ago. His partner decided to let go of many thousand items that he and Florian had accumulated over the years. According to the estate sale company, many of the best tiki related items were in storage and not being sold. Even so, many very nice items were to be found. Here's what I scored.

Images from book "Great Restaurants of the United States"



Image from book "Restaurants of Puerto Rico"

A Treasure Craft Mug and S&P set.


Little wood mug.

Business card and letter head for Florian.


Bunch of cool records. The Strings Over Hawaii LP features a cover photo taken at the Luau Restaurant in Beverly Hills, which Florian help design.





Sea & Jungle Imports Catalog from 1972 (Some great color pages! Take a look.)
















This is a picture of what Florian's house looked like.

There were many items that were priced way out of my range. Some were Polynesian and a lot were not.

Awesome score, Chub.

Thank you so much for sharing all of these amazing items.

(What did Tattoo end up with?)

Way cool! Thanks for sharing!

I am lovin' this guy:

Would love item 123 from the "Sea and Jungle" catalog.

Tattoo got a few really nice items too. One was a carved wood spear that was hiding in the umbrella stand. Wish I would have seen it! I'm sure he'll post pics soon.

Wow Chub, What a cool surprise, I would've had a heart attack if I'd stumbled on to that much cool stuff.

Do you know if the estate sale is officially over?

[ Edited by: Bora Boris 2008-04-03 14:45 ]

Yes, I think the sale ended last weekend. I believe the Estate Sale company was called Susan Yost Estate Sales or something like that.

By the way, #123 would have cost you $115.00 in 1972!

I've wondered if there was any kind of documentation of Sea & Jungle Imports other than the photo in the BOT where most of the tikis look like they've been kicked in the jewels and am glad to see something else exists. It's sales like this that justify digging through all the Avon bottles and kids clothes, nice going.

Wow, how lucky that some TCers found this, congrats!
That's the house me and Otto visited Gabe in more than 10 years ago for my research for the BOT. What a great, funny guy. He had gotten into collecting Kachina dolls and those Indian owl pots by then. He let me photocopy the stuff he had left from his Stephen Crane/George Nakashima days. He even gave me George's phone number and I never followed up on it (BANG! --the sound of shooting myself). He was one of the people that made me feel great for being able to hand him the Book of Tiki after its completion, and to see how thrilled he was.

In appreciation, he gave me two originals, one was the water color he made of a corner of the Trader Vic's in Beverly Hills. That painting was his test for his job at Stephen Crane Associates in the late 50s, he was sent there as an art spy and did this, and he was hired.

And then he drew me my own Tiki Mug design :) (he did one for Otto too):

I never really got conclusive evidence WHICH Stephen Crane mugs he designed, here is a copy of a Rum barrel rendering he did:

First off, nice drawings Big Bro! It's nice to know that Florian saw some re-appreciation of his work while he was still alive!

As Chub said, I did find a nice little Tiki artifact in the umbrella stand.

It's about 3 feet tall and I don't know exactly what it is. It looks like a mix between a spear and a giant letter opener. I've seen something of similar referred to as a God Stick (?).

Regardless, I definitely feel very fortunate to have such a nice memento from one of my favorite Tiki designers.

Hey Tattoo, looks like you got #89 in the Sea & Jungle Imports catalog.

Close, but not quite. I think the Sea & Jungle one is a little bit heftier than the one above. More like the other weapons, of which some can still be gotten at Oceanic Arts. I think Tattoo's might be a tourist item from Tahiti...then again, all those Marquesan design carvings were at on point available as that, and then imported. Nowadays that stuff is hard to find, even in the Society Islands.