Feature: What's In a Name?
March 1, 2004
Such convoluted alliances
play into designer Michael Vanderbyl’s impression that furniture operates on a
model that is at least 20 years old. “The auto industry has successfully
persuaded people that a Ford is worth $35,000, and yet American furniture makers
don’t even try to convince people to spend more than $1,000 on a sofa,” says
Vanderbyl, who has an upscale signature line with Baker and is about to unveil
another, the Domicile Collection, through Bolier & Co., founded by former
Baker president Plasman. “Baker has not been as successful as it could be
because it put its stores in the weirdest locations, like Pittsburgh and
Cincinnati, which isn’t its market. Even Thomasville doesn’t get it. They’re
doing Humphrey Bogart and Ernest Hemingway, neither of whom, as far as I know,
were furniture designers. They are still mired in the mentality that their
distribution limits what they can sell. With that they’ve essentially ignored
the high-end consumer.” Adding to this, says Vanderbyl, is the fact that, unlike
most large American industries, the furniture business does not control its own
distribution. “So all the expensive branding and displays are at the mercy of
the mom and pops.”
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Michael Smith’s carved Italian bed, at Thomas Lavin. (Click image to enlarge)Buyers of luxury furniture are, however, not immune to a
designer’s star status. “The fact is, whenever the end user has a party, they
all talk about what they bought. They have their chinchilla coats and their jets
and a Michael Smith sofa or a Madeline Stuart chair,” says Thomas Lavin, whose
Los Angeles showroom sells “couture furniture”—custom furniture designed by
independent craftsmen—by such designers as Michael S. Smith, Gary Hutton and
Maxine Snider. “It gives them a kind of cachet, so why not recognize it.” There
will always be wealthy lemmings who will walk into a showroom and purchase a
designer’s entire line in the hope of acquiring the instant mantle of good
taste. “Good design is good design,” says Barry. “If you can pair with a manufacturer who can get it out there to more people, I
don’t see anything wrong with that.”
But the very thought of someone’s
wanting to emulate his “lifestyle” makes a designer like Bill Sofield
apprehensive. “I’m not of the ‘light a candle and take a bubble bath’ genre,” he
says. “I’m more the type to bring home a bag of groceries just about the time
people arrive for dinner. And I drive an old beat-up truck. I don’t really have
the time to invent myself as a personality.” Nevertheless, he says, “if my name
stands for a certain kind of quality or eclectic vision, that’s
wonderful.”
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