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February 2006
What makes a great furniture design?
The best furniture is comfortable, durable and handsome. I don’t know if beautiful is the right word. Great design has to do with proportions and detail. It never forces the form to do something awkward, and it has a kind of elegance that comes from the way you sit in it.
The form should follow the technology. Something has a certain form because of the way it’s made. Not the other way around. Strict technology looks awkward. Why not a more logical statement? Often pieces look strange because they’re pushing a technology in the wrong direction.
Most important, and I might argue with Niels Diffrient about this, furniture is an object in your environment. You don’t sit in it all the time. So the environment and the furniture have to work together. A chair has to relate to itself first and then to its environment.
Your website shows your very modern furniture in your very old farmhouse. Why does this look work so well?
Modern furniture just looks very good in old houses. Modern homes with modern furniture look more like furniture showrooms than homes people actually live in. But things like old Shaker pieces, a Shaker chest of drawers maybe, greatly enhance modern architecture. And modern furniture has a lot in common with some old designs, particularly Shaker, because they both offer straightforward solutions.
Do you have a favorite piece of furniture?
I admire a lot of chairs but there is a chair I worked on with Harry Bertoia. I have great admiration for it. Harry was working with Charles Eames and Hans [Knoll] asked Harry to come east and start looking in
hospitals to get ideas for a line of healthcare chairs. Harry said he didn’t work that way. He was a sculptor. He wanted to work directly with the materials and he could work with wire extremely well. The diamond shape of what we call the Diamond Chair has a logic to it that’s absolutely perfect and it never would have happened if he had looked in a hospital.
Maybe it’s not what would knock your socks off if you saw one in a store, but I think it’s one of the great designs.
As an aside, only Harry knew how to make the chair and only by hand. We had to invent a way to manufacture it. I went to Europe after that chair was introduced and taught people how to make it. This is exactly what you would tell a student not to do! We say invent something that already has technology behind it. Nobody could make that chair but Harry. Luckily, Knoll had a philosophy that we should create designs that are worth making.
How did the Petal Table come to be shown with Harry Bertoia’s Diamond Chairs?
Knoll was trying to sell Harry’s chairs, but there wasn’t anything to go with them. So I designed the Petal Table for the chairs. The table ended up being more expensive than the chairs because it was made out of redwood, each petal separately made has an appeal.
People like the tables so we now sell one with a plastic petal. We use a solid plastic with no finish, a wonderful material that we found luckily. It’s not molded but carved and it’s weatherproof.
Finding new weatherproof materials must be a great boon to an outdoor furniture designer.
That’s one of the big problems we have. Everything we make has to resist salt water, acid rain etcetera, etcetera. Everything has to be super carefully thought through and tested so we know that it will stay completely free from corrosion.
We have stainless steel furniture too, and that’s not an easy thing either. It has to be finished in such a way to prevent rusting. When stainless steel items are made with tooling that is not stainless, little bits of carbon steel from the tooling get into the end product. That’s why sometimes you see rusted dots on a stainless steel piece. We’re extremely careful about testing that. I’ve had some prototypes sitting in my garden in Pennsylvania for 10 years and they still look like new.
Do you want to work with any other materials?
Sure. I’m looking for ways to make wooden furniture. Teak is available and common for outdoor use but I would like to try using cedar. Cedar’s common in houses but not as a wood for outdoor furniture. It’s always a little tricky to introduce new products in the market, but new ideas in furniture are what most appeals to me.
All my life I’ve been a designer. I worked for Knoll for 20 years and there, we never thought of the market. There wasn’t a market. So we did what we wanted to do. The assumption was that if we like it will be good and it will sell.
When you have your own small company and it takes so much money to introduce new furniture, it’s hard to do because you don’t want it to fail. I hate that. Look at the auto industry. It’s a blur of aerodynamic boxes running down the street. They produce what they’ve already seen is successful.
Are you working on any new projects now?
I’m always working on something. The problem is it’s easier to conceive of a new idea than it is to actually realize it in three dimensions. But I’m doing some variations on the 1966 Furniture Collection.
I don’t consider it new design really, although they’re new products that relate to and are essentially an extension of the 1966 design. We’re doing an extended seat––it’s not really a sofa because each chair is separate with the exact same structural system strung together. We’re also doing a rocking chair with a mesh seat.
What about the Topiary collection? It’s very different from the straight lined pieces you’re known for.
Topiary is taking a long time to become a best seller. I thought it would appeal to the traditionalist. It’s a chair designed to look like a shrub that’s been cut to look like a chair. The sunlight flows throw the holes and casts shadows on the ground
Topiary is an example of something we probably want to avoid doing again because it has little market acceptance. Although, a man in New Jersey used Topiary in his open walled restaurant, where the walls are covered with ivy. It looks fabulous there, it’s exactly how it should be used.
Is introducing something that’s truly innovative too much of a financial gamble for many smaller businesses to take?
It’s one of the problems of design that poets and painters don’t have. They don’t have a production factory to keep running
Why don’t we like new ideas?
People today don’t have good visual educations. They’re very old fashioned in what they accept. The most furniture sold in this country is called Early American. Everyone likes what their mother liked.
One should have more courses in art history and also design history and architecture. These would be very valuable types of education to give students. Not just design students, all students. It would greatly improve our physical environment. City planning would be revered. Our world would be different.
You’ve seen suburban developments. At sometime the whole country is going to look like those. And the work will not age well. The best you can hope for is it will all be concealed by trees. Modern buildings and neighborhoods are so ugly even the fireplaces are fake. My old house has a kind of integrity, these new homes look just as bland as they are. This is a big problem for America now.
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