GUEST: I brought a hanging chrome bird lamp that I found at a thrift store a couple years ago. I've never seen anything like it and it was on the bottom shelf and people had probably passed it over, and I loved it, so I bought it, I didn't think twice about it. I put the bulbs in it, played around with different bulbs. And still didn't have any place to put it in my house. And then just put it down the basement.
APPRAISER: Well, what you've brought us today is a really fun example of space age modern design. And this is a chrome lamp with these acrylic wings, and it's made my a company in Italy called Torino. I would say this dates from around the 1960s. I would call this actually the robot bird lamp, because this company, Torino, made a whole series of lamps in polished chrome of robots, robot men, robot woman, robot baby, robot dog, and we have a robot bird here. Those were mostly all table lamps, though, and you've brought us this really rare example of a hanging lamp by Torino. They did just a few other examples of hanging lamps, but this one is exceedingly rare and we don't see these come to the market very often. There have been other bird lamps that are table lamps come up, but I think you've got a real find here. This lamp is marked by the Torino company, with an applied metal label to the top of the perch here.
GUEST: Right.
APPRAISER: And it's marked Torino with their symbol, which is a bull, which is appropriate. This would have come with slightly larger globular frosted light bulbs, and it would have had one at the top here in the head, and one at the bottom.
GUEST: Right.
APPRAISER: You paid what at the thrift store when you purchased this?
GUEST: I paid about $15.
APPRAISER: I believe if this was in a gallery in a major metropolitan area like Los Angeles, that specializes in modern design, I think they would be asking a retail price of $2,000 for this lamp.
GUEST: (chuckles) That's ridiculous. (chuckles) That's great, no, that's unbelievable. Unbelievable.
