John Birch, owner of midcentury mecca Wyeth, knows a lot about vintage furniture– and butterflies. The latter passion started 10 years ago when a caterpillar crawled into the Sagaponack store and formed its chrysalis right onto a Wegner Peacock chair and was left in peace to complete its metamorphosis.
With plenty of milkweed on the store’s property, it was a haven for the butterflies—every year Birch would watch the cycle unfold right outside the front door, where eventually the insects would fly north to Canada and then south to Mexico for the winter. But as the milkweed dwindled, Birch brought them inside for what has become a recurring summer residence. “There is a perfection to them that I equate to what I see and work with—there is a consistency in the level of quality,” he says.
