Feature: What's In a Name?

William Kissel

03/01/2004

In spring 2005, Barbara Barry will launch a new signature furniture collection through Henredon with an ambitious goal—to sell much more than upscale sofas and chairs to tony shoppers. Unlike the pieces produced under her recently expired contractual arrangement with Baker Knapp & Tubbs, which helped establish the Los Angeles interior designer’s star power as a furniture maker, Barry’s new line is more like a lifestyle, encompassing everything from furniture and light fixtures to tabletop and bed linens. And she hopes to ultimately market everything through her own shops.

Antoine Proulx’s dining suite in bleached ash. (Click image to enlarge)

Not only will Henredon be a nameless partner, but the arrangement will also allow her to break out of the Baker mold, says Barry. “With Baker I basically did one finish, which was called Java. But with my custom line for a high-end clientele, I work with many finishes. So now there will be accessories and hardware and lighting and soft goods done in a variety of different finishes.” If having her own shops comes to pass, she adds, “we may even reinvent the paradigm of how furniture is sold in America.”

Michael S. Smith’s Braque armchair, at Thomas Lavin. (Click image to enlarge)

Interior designers taking on the role of furniture taste-makers is a phenomenon that has exploded over the past decade. Although Bernhardt and Hickory Business Furniture (HBF) started nurturing the work of interior designers as early as 1982, most believe Michigan-based Baker Knapp & Tubbs paved the way when former HBF president Chris Plasman joined Baker and signed Barry to a multiyear contract in 1996. Over the ensuing years, the company inked deals with a growing list of top-name talent, including multidisciplinary designer Michael Vanderbyl, Thomas Pheasant and Bill Sofield.

Orlando Diaz-Azcuy’s Toscana chair and ottoman for McGuire. (Click image to enlarge)

“I was a prototypical designer for Baker and set the mark for others to follow,” says Barry, whose sinuous new Script collection of rattan pieces for McGuire, a division of Kohler that also owns Baker, is among her best. “But they made a move to have their brand predominate and to introduce other collections, and I think I’m more than a collections designer, so it was a fundamental decision,” she explains.


At around the same time that Barry was signing on with Baker in the mid 1990s, nearly all of the major American furniture giants—Century, Bernhardt, Thomasville, Lexington, Vaughan Bassett—were licensing the talents of prominent interior designers to build star power into the furniture business. Concurrently, many interior designers forged ahead independently with their own custom furniture lines without an alliance with an established furniture maker.

Michael Vanderbyl’s new Domicile collection for Bolier & Co. includes the Crescent lounge chair. (Click image to enlarge)

The difference between the two approaches has become a debate over quality. Some argue that licensed collections built by major manufacturers are inferior to made-to-order furniture because they are produced in factories that turn out hundreds of pieces at a time. Others insist that made-to-order collections are hardly custom because they are not entirely handmade. “Consumers know good design. So once they get over liking the product, then the fact that it’s a Bill Sofield or Barbara Barry or Thomas Pheasant only adds to the credibility of the product,” says Daniel Bradley, president of Baker Knapp & Tubbs.

Barbara Barry’s latest collection for McGuire includes the Script chairs inspired by Spencerian calligraphy.  (Click image to enlarge)

What is not debatable is how most of this furniture is being marketed predominantly to affluent buyers, who recognize the names of decorators and often use their services. Still the end goal, arguably a number of years away, for most of the major players is to educate, and ultimately sell, to aspirational shoppers as well.

A writing desk, from Michael Vanderbyl’s Archetype collection, has pullout trays on either side. From Baker.  (Click image to enlarge)

“We live in a world now where everyone believes they have the right to be fabulous,” says Los Angeles interior designer Madeline Stuart, who describes her made-to-order furniture as neither trendy nor contemporary, but quietly elegant and understated. “Whether the person is a shoe designer, a sheet maker or a cookbook author, everybody wants their name out there because we live in a cult of celebrity. If your name isn’t out there, you haven’t achieved a level of success that is due. It’s your right as an American.”


So why should the furniture business be any different? asks another independent, Marc Desplaines, owner and designer of San Francisco–based Antoine Proulx. After all, the marriage between furniture makers and interior designers is a long-established union. “When you look back at Pierre Chareau, Eugene Printz, Eileen Gray or Jacques-Emile Ruhlmann, they were all interior designers who started making furniture so that they could control it. It’s how they established their look and how they got their commissions,” says Desplaines.

Bill Sofield’s Kiosk butler’s chest has lacquered doors that open to reveal a mirrored interior and fitted trays. From Baker.  (Click image to enlarge)

Baker had a unique partnership with Danish designer Finn Juhl as early as 1950, says Daniel Bradley, and it will launch French designer Jacques Garcia’s signature line this spring. Nevertheless, says Bradley, despite the success of subsequent licensing partners throughout the 1990s, “we use these names to enhance the Baker brand, not replace it.”

Marc Desplaines of Antoine Proulx designed the bedroom suite—platform bed, bedside table and light fixtures—in smoke gray oak. (Photo by Ted Dillard, click to enlarge)

That may have been true in the beginning, but designer names have permanently altered the landscape of the furniture business. “When I started Aero Studio in the late 1980s, it was amazing how little luxury was in the furniture market,” says Bill Sofield, whose store designs for Gucci and furniture collection for Baker have garnered the New York designer international celebrity status. “At the time, The New York Times was doing stories like ‘The New Frugality’ and making it sound as if a well-made sofa was indulgent and very politically incorrect. But after 9/11 and the whole Enron scandal, I think people have a fear of the power that corporations levy. Individual designer names bring a more human approach—there is actually a personality behind the collection.”


“Ten years ago when I started out, the furniture business seemed so loosey-goosey,” says Desplaines of Antoine Proulx. “In many cases, you needed a hovercraft to get through the showrooms because most were piled with $5,000 chairs lined up against the walls. That’s not the case anymore.” These days Desplaines equates what is happening in fine furniture with his early days when he was working for fashion iconoclast Yohji Yamamoto. “Today, the showrooms are done as vignettes by designer, by collection. You know when you’re in the Ted Boerner space or the Antoine Proulx area. It’s all marketed, advertised and put together the way fashion has always been.”

Kevin Kolanowski’s Vreeland chandelier of hand-stitched organic mica squares is his “bold tribute to couture craftsmanship and legendary taste.” At Thomas Lavin.  (Click image to enlarge)

Naturally, the furniture industry believes there are benefits to alliances with interior designers. Most believe that designers are tastemakers who often create furniture around design problems they have found within their own work. “It’s really a matter of bringing the vision and design integrity of somebody who struggles on a daily basis with the challenge of making spaces pleasing and inviting, and giving them the opportunity to work in a different medium,” says Jason Phillips, president of McGuire, a Kohler-owned company that works closely with designers Orlando Diaz-Azcuy and Barbara Barry.

Nevertheless, notes former Baker president Christian Plasman, who brought Barbara Barry to the brand, “picking a star designer doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to be successful. There is a point where star quality has value if you want to create a buzz around your product, but it still has to be a good design. A bad design even by a star designer is not going to sell.” Or as Bernhardt owner Alex Bernhardt Sr. says, “Meritorious furniture always wins out because the consumer has to look at the piece and like it before he or she looks at the brand name.”

But, as with fashion, most designer names have become a very efficient means of categorizing buyers. “I walked into a store the other day and someone was trying to put me in something and I said, ‘No, I see myself as more of a Gucci client,’ and she knew exactly what that meant—sexy, tailored, edgy. It was a way to telegraph my sensibility in a dressing room without saying too much,” says Madeline Stuart, who thinks furniture buying operates on a similar principle. “People say so much by the sofa they pick, the lamp they select, or the rug they put on the floor. They are establishing themselves, their social and economic stature. So every choice for people who take this seriously—the cut, the finish, the materials used—is highly considered and meant to convey a myriad of impressions.”

Most agree that manufacturers have carried the concept a bit too far with lines “designed by” Arnold Palmer, Humphrey Bogart, Ernest Hemingway and even Elvis Presley. “My immediate thought is, what credentials do these people have?” asks Bernhardt Sr., whose 114-year-old signature firm established its own partnership with Martha Stewart three years ago. “I assume the logic is to latch onto a star with high name recognition. But for me it falls apart unless there is some credibility behind the name.”


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.”

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.”


Madeline Stuart agrees. “My name is not attached to my furniture because I think people should kneel down at the altar of my design sensibility,” she says. “I’m designing good furniture and it might as well say John Doe collection, because it’s just as viable without my name. Conversely, because my name is attached, I feel a responsibility to the showrooms to promote it. So I’m out there flogging the bushes to rouse people to pay attention and be aware of my line, and I hope that attachment signifies a certain level of taste.” 

Antoine Proulx
415.931.8281
www.antoineproulx.com

Barbara Barry
310.276.9977
www.barbarabarry.com

Baker Knapp & Tubbs
800.59.BAKER
www.kohlerinteriors.com

Bernhardt
877.205.5793
www.bernhardt.com

Bolier & Co.
336.887.2815
www.bolierco.com

William Sofield
212.473.1300

Madeline Stuart
323.935.3305
www.madelinestuart.com

McGuire
415.626.1414
www.kohlerinteriors.com

Michael Vanderbyl
415.543.8447
www.vanderbyldesign.com

Thomas Lavin
 310.278.2456
www.thomaslavin.com