Phyllis Washington Collection

Phyllis Washington Collection In 1998 Phyllis opened Maison Felice/Phyllis Washington Antiques in Palm Desert, CA

There are entrances. And then there are arrivals.This French wall-mounted console — mid-19th century, cream-painted and ...
06/04/2026

There are entrances. And then there are arrivals.
This French wall-mounted console — mid-19th century, cream-painted and parcel-gilt, its two sweeping supports converging to a single gilded point with the elegant confidence of a V that knows exactly what it is doing — transforms a desert entryway at midnight into something from an entirely different world. The faux-painted marble top, rendered with the trompe l'oeil skill that the great French decorative painters of the period mastered so completely it routinely fooled experts, catches the warm light of flanking crystal drops and holds it. Above, a giltwood mirror in the Louis XVI manner doubles the room and the desert night beyond in equal measure.
The console form — wall-mounted, requiring no rear legs, dependent entirely on the wall and its own structural elegance for support — was the great test of the neoclassical furniture maker. There was nowhere to hide. The proportions had to be exactly right. The gilding had to be exactly right. The relationship between the painted surface and the gilt detail had to be exactly right.
This one is exactly right.
Flanked by Persian carpets and the Santa Rosa Mountains glimpsed through floor-to-ceiling glass on either side, it does what only the finest antiques ever manage — it makes the contemporary room feel as though it has always contained it, and always will.
Available exclusively at Maison Felice.
www.maisonfelice.com
Where history lives and legacies begin.

Three thousand years of ritual. One perfect object. A city that never sleeps, spread beneath it like an offering.This 18...
06/03/2026

Three thousand years of ritual. One perfect object. A city that never sleeps, spread beneath it like an offering.
This 18th-century Chinese bronze censer — raised on its original carved hardwood stand, a pairing that has survived three centuries intact and is, for that reason alone, extraordinarily rare — carries within it one of the oldest continuous traditions in human culture. The burning of incense in vessels of this kind predates written Chinese history. It was practiced in the courts of emperors and the sanctuaries of temples, in private chambers of meditation and grand halls of ceremony. The smoke rising from a censer like this one was understood not as fragrance but as communication — a bridge between the earthly and the divine.
The bronze is cast with high-relief panels of cranes and mythological creatures, the foo dog finial presiding from the lid with the composed authority that this particular guardian has carried across every culture that has ever used him. The Greek key frieze. The original stand, its carved hardwood worn smooth by the hands of generations who have lifted and placed and admired this object across three hundred years.
Against a skyline of glass and steel and the perpetual motion of a modern city, it does not look out of place. It looks inevitable — a reminder that the things that have mattered to human beings have always mattered, regardless of what century surrounds them.
Available exclusively at Maison Felice.
www.maisonfelice.com
Where history lives and legacies begin.

This is what a room looks like when someone has genuinely good taste and the courage to use it.A forest green velvet sof...
06/03/2026

This is what a room looks like when someone has genuinely good taste and the courage to use it.
A forest green velvet sofa — circa 1960, its brass legs catching the desert light with the understated confidence of an era that understood proportion above all else — anchors a room that has been assembled with the kind of considered intelligence that no interior designer's formula can produce. Flanking it, a pair of CY Mann armchairs in chrome and gold geometric fabric complete the conversation with the authority of two people who have absolutely earned their place at the table.
Mann was one of mid-century America's most visionary furniture designers — a man who understood that modernism was not a style but a philosophy, and that a chair built on that philosophy could hold its own in any room in any era. Beside this sofa, before these mountains, beside this pool, in this particular quality of desert afternoon light — he has been proven entirely correct.
At Maison Felice we celebrate design without borders or periods. From 17th-century European masterworks to the great names of mid-century modernism to contemporary fine art — what matters is not when something was made but whether it was made with conviction, with skill, and with the understanding that beauty in a room is not decoration. It is a decision about how you intend to live.
Rooms like this one are that decision, made perfectly.
Available exclusively at Maison Felice.
www.maisonfelice.com
Where history lives and legacies begin.

He has been grinning like this for centuries and shows absolutely no sign of stopping.This winged grotesque mask — paint...
06/03/2026

He has been grinning like this for centuries and shows absolutely no sign of stopping.
This winged grotesque mask — painted in ochre and burnt sienna on a cream ground, surrounded by scrolling acanthus of confident baroque energy — is a detail from a set of painted decorative panels in our gallery. And it is, in the way that the very best decorative details always are, a complete world in miniature.
The grotesque — that particular category of ornament combining human faces, animal features, foliage and fantasy in compositions that follow their own dream logic — has one of the longest histories in Western decorative art. It was found on the walls of Nero's Domus Aurea when Renaissance excavators broke through in the 15th century, and the painters who descended on ropes to see it by torchlight — Raphael among them — were so captivated that they named the style after the grottoes in which they found it and proceeded to spread it across every ceiling, panel and pilaster in Europe.
This face carries all of that history. The wings. The knowing grin. The collar dissolving into flame. It is simultaneously ancient and entirely alive — the kind of detail that a craftsman put into a corner that most people would never examine closely, because they understood that the work deserved to be done properly regardless of whether anyone was watching.
Someone is watching now.

Available exclusively at Maison Felice.
www.maisonfelice.com
Where history lives and legacies begin.

Two civilizations. One extraordinary object. A desert night stretching to the stars beyond.This ormolu-mounted Chinese t...
06/03/2026

Two civilizations. One extraordinary object. A desert night stretching to the stars beyond.
This ormolu-mounted Chinese turquoise glazed vase and cover is the physical embodiment of one of history's great cultural conversations — the moment when 18th-century France, utterly captivated by the ceramics arriving from China, decided that the finest pieces deserved frames worthy of them. French bronziers of extraordinary skill designed and cast mounts — handles, bases, covers — in gilded bronze of such quality that the resulting objects became something neither wholly Chinese nor wholly French, but entirely their own. A new thing made from two ancient traditions, each amplifying the other.
The turquoise glaze — that particular luminous blue-green that the Chinese potters of the 18th century achieved through copper oxide in the kiln and that no subsequent manufacturer has quite replicated — glows against the warm gold of the ormolu with the particular contrast that only genuinely complementary things produce. The pierced acanthus cover. The scrolling Rococo handles. The elaborate foliate base lifting the whole composition with the exuberance of a period that believed more was, in fact, more.
On a dark console at midnight, fire burning beyond the glass and the Coachella Valley spread beneath a starlit sky, it glows like something from another world.
Which, in the most literal sense, it is.

Available exclusively at Maison Felice.
www.maisonfelice.com
Where history lives and legacies begin.

Portugal in the 18th century was a kingdom drunk on possibility — and its furniture shows every drop of it.This walnut s...
06/02/2026

Portugal in the 18th century was a kingdom drunk on possibility — and its furniture shows every drop of it.
This walnut side chair — one of a matched set of four, mid-18th century — is Portuguese Rococo at its most unapologetic. The pierced splat back moves through a series of shaped voids and carved solids with the restless energy of a style that absorbed French elegance, English pragmatism and something altogether wilder from its own particular Atlantic soul and produced, from that combustion, furniture unlike anything made anywhere else. The crest rail erupts in carved acanthus of genuine exuberance. The apron carves and scrolls beneath the seat with the confidence of a craftsman who had not been told there were limits.
And yet — and this is what separates great Rococo from merely busy Rococo — it holds together. Every curve resolves. Every void earns its place. The silk ikat upholstery in saffron and teal sits against the dark walnut the way an unexpected truth sits in a sentence: perfectly, and as though it could not have been otherwise.
Beside a fluted sienna marble column fragment in our gallery, it occupies the corner with the ease of something that has always known exactly where it belongs.

Available exclusively at Maison Felice.
www.maisonfelice.com
Where history lives and legacies begin.

He burned Rome. He built it back. He remains, two thousand years later, the most compelling figure in any room he enters...
06/02/2026

He burned Rome. He built it back. He remains, two thousand years later, the most compelling figure in any room he enters.
This Italian stone bust of the Emperor Nero — carved with the unflinching realism that the Roman portrait tradition demanded and the Grand Tour workshops of Italy perpetuated with extraordinary skill — regards the world from a pietra dura specimen table in our gallery with the expression of a man who has heard everything and been impressed by very little. The military paludamentum falls from his shoulder with the casual authority of someone who wore it not as costume but as fact. The face — those heavy-lidded eyes, that particular set of the mouth — is unmistakably, historically Nero. The likeness follows the great imperial portrait type with the fidelity of a sculptor who understood that some faces belong to history and must be treated accordingly.
Nero is, of course, complicated. The emperor who fiddled while Rome burned. Who built the Domus Aurea — that golden palace of extraordinary ambition — across the scorched ruins. Who was, depending on which ancient source you trust, a tyrant or a misunderstood aesthete or both simultaneously. History rarely produces simple men of absolute power. It produces Nero.
On a table inlaid with the rarest stones of the ancient world, in a gallery that understands that beauty and complexity are not opposites, he is entirely at home.

Available exclusively at Maison Felice.
www.maisonfelice.com
Where history lives and legacies begin.

Black and gold. The desert. The mountains beyond.There are combinations that simply work — and this is one of the most a...
06/02/2026

Black and gold. The desert. The mountains beyond.
There are combinations that simply work — and this is one of the most arresting ones we have ever put together.
This pair of late Qing Dynasty gilt-decorated black glazed vases — their mirror-black grounds populated with gold scrolling lotus, celestial medallions and auspicious cloud motifs of extraordinary delicacy, each one raised on an ormolu Rococo base that married Chinese Imperial craft to French decorative sensibility with complete conviction — commands a desert entryway at midday with the composed authority of objects that have never once doubted their own importance.
The Qing Dynasty potters who produced black-glazed work of this quality understood the ground as more than a colour. The mirror black — achieved through precise kiln temperatures and iron-rich glazes — was itself a statement: a surface so deep and reflective that the gilt decoration applied to it seems to float in space rather than rest upon it. The effect, in desert light, is extraordinary.
On a contemporary plaster and brass console, before agave and saguaro and the Santa Rosa Mountains, they do not merely occupy the space. They define it.
Two imperial voices. One perfect room.

Available exclusively at Maison Felice.
www.maisonfelice.com
Where history lives and legacies begin.

Some objects arrive from such a distance — in time, in culture, in meaning — that they simply silence the room around th...
06/01/2026

Some objects arrive from such a distance — in time, in culture, in meaning — that they simply silence the room around them.
This is one of them.
A navicella — a marble model of an ancient Roman galley, its prow carved with a ferocious sea creature of such conviction that you half expect it to move, its hull bearing an armorial cartouche on the plinth below — is among the most evocative objects the Grand Tour produced. Young aristocrats making their passage through Italy in the 18th and 19th centuries encountered the ancient world not as history but as living presence: the galleys that once crossed the Mediterranean, the legions that built an empire from a single city, the civilization that produced everything Western culture would spend two thousand years trying to equal.
They brought pieces like this home as proof of what they had seen. As evidence that they had stood in the places where the world began.
Carved in Carrara marble — that luminous white stone that Michelangelo chose above all others, quarried from the same Tuscan mountains for over two millennia — this navicella rests on an extraordinary pietra dura inlaid floor in our gallery on El Paseo, flanked by a classical bust and a gilded Rococo console, as natural in this company as though it had always been here.
Perhaps, in the ways that matter, it always has.
Available exclusively at Maison Felice.
www.maisonfelice.com
Where history lives and legacies begin.

He has been making this face for over a century and he has absolutely no regrets about it.This magnificent detail — a ki...
06/01/2026

He has been making this face for over a century and he has absolutely no regrets about it.
This magnificent detail — a kitten mid-pronouncement, rendered in oil with the kind of technical bravura that stops you in your tracks — is the work of Louis-Eugène Lambert, the 19th century French painter who understood animals the way Velázquez understood royalty. Which is to say: completely, and with enormous respect for their opinions of themselves.
Lambert was a student of Delacroix and a favorite of Napoleon III, whose own cats he painted with the same seriousness a court portraitist might bring to an emperor. He exhibited regularly at the Paris Salon throughout the latter half of the 19th century and built a reputation that was, in his time, without equal in the genre of animal painting. His secret was simple and extraordinary: he did not paint animals as charming accessories to human life. He painted them as protagonists. As individuals with interior lives and strong views about things.
This kitten, for example, clearly has strong views about things.
Beside him in the full composition, a regal dog surveys his domain from a small rise with the composure of someone who has never doubted his own authority for a single moment. Together they are Lambert at his most irresistible — technically flawless, deeply observed, and possessed of a warmth that two centuries have done nothing to diminish.
Available exclusively at Maison Felice.
www.maisonfelice.com
Where history lives and legacies begin.

Address

73960 El Paseo
Palm Desert, CA
92260

Opening Hours

Monday 10am - 5pm
Tuesday 10am - 5pm
Wednesday 10am - 5pm
Thursday 10am - 5pm
Friday 10am - 5pm
Saturday 10am - 5pm

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+17608620021

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