High design with mass appeal

MOVE over, Martha. Everywhere you turn, another celebrity home designer has joined forces with a budget-minded retailer to offer well-designed, affordable furniture and accessories.

Nate Berkus at Linens ‘n Things, Chris Madden at JCPenney, Ty Pennington at Sears and Thomas O’Brien -- who went from furnishing Giorgio Armani’s Manhattan digs to Target stores everywhere -- are wooing shoppers weaned on hours of TV home decorating shows and dozens of home magazines.

For millions of these newly sophisticated but cash-challenged consumers, interior design has become a favorite form of self-expression. In catering to their needs, retailers are reshaping the low-price end of the $75-billion home furnishing industry, turning it from cheap to chic.

For the fall, accessorize the house in blue and brown with $7 cup and saucer sets or $4.99 placemats from Jonathan Adler Happy Home. Want to update the family room? A snappy ottoman by Todd Oldham for La-Z-Boy can be had for $119.

Want a metro or retro nightstand, or a simply shabby hutch? It’s all out there, ready to assemble, in varying degrees of quality, at prices most can afford. Items as varied as wastebaskets and night lights to sofas and dining tables have been re-imagined for aesthetes indulging in the new art form of do-it-yourself decor.

Attempts to bring good design to the masses are not new. From Europe’s Bauhaus in the 1920s and ‘30s through America’s Charles and Ray Eames -- whose iconic 1940s wood and plastic chair designs are still produced -- there have always been designers, and sometimes retailers, eager to unite function and form with affordability. It hasn’t always worked.

In the 1980s, England’s Terence Conran briefly sold good design at moderate prices in New York, but didn’t succeed. IKEA opened its first U.S. store in 1985, and struck it rich with well-designed flat-packed furniture at good prices.

Ellen Lupton, curator of contemporary design at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, traces today’s trend to the ‘90s, which she calls “Martha Stewart’s decade -- the time when our country’s taste in design totally changed.” “Martha showed people how to think design at the highest level. She redefined what home life should look like: open and light and natural and soft and clean.” Today, Lupton says, do-it-yourself fine design is less elitist and easier than ever -- a result of the high-style injection Stewart initiated, and then carried into Kmart -- and now carried forward by others. It’s benefited all concerned -- especially the designers who license their names and designs for big bucks, and retailers who can’t seem to keep their wares in stock.

Lupton says: “Target played a huge part in all this; they are very experimental and brave in their design and merchandising strategy.”

The chain made architect Michael Graves a household housewares name, expanded fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi’s reach into home decor, and is now out to make O’Brien the latest home decor maven for the masses, with its current blitz of TV commercials.

The current trend toward affordable design is made possible by improved technology and reduced offshore production costs, which have helped drive prices down. Fully assembled furniture made in Asia today is 20% to 40% lower priced than when it was produced domestically five years ago, according to Britt Beemer, chairman of America’s Research Group. “A sectional couch that was $2,000 then might be $1,450 now. A table that was $4,000 might be $2,500 today.”

In a consumer world of bountiful goods of more or less equal functionality, a well-designed item stands out.

Karim Rashid recalls that when he knocked on dozens of U.S. corporate doors in the early 1990s, no one bought his theories about the power of good design -- or his designs -- until 1996. That’s when he created a curvy translucent plastic wastebasket called the Garbo, for the Canadian firm Umbra.

Seven million Garbo baskets have been sold since then. And a million of Rashid’s Oh chairs, designed a few years later, have been sold by the same firm.

The chairs are swoops of polypropylene plastic with cutouts. They sell for about $40, although Rashid originally hoped they’d be priced at $25.

“I wanted to design a better plastic chair -- affordable, environmentally friendly, comfortable and stackable. I wanted good design to be accessible,” he says. “But it’s hard to make democratic, smart, high-quality, intelligent products inexpensively. Not unless that’s the real intent of everybody involved: the store, the designer, the culture.”

Rashid is now working on a collection that includes upholstered furniture -- sofas and chairs, all less than $800 for a big-box chain.

“The availability to offer quality goods at great prices” has given Chris Madden, (who designs for JCPenney), a new perspective. She says the emphasis of designers when she began in the business 20 years ago was “totally on the high-end stuff.... Some of my designer friends said they wouldn’t touch a room for under $50,000.”

Her designs for JCPenney -- sectionals, $1,199 to $2,469; dining groups, $909 to $2,509 -- are at a quality level she can live with. In fact, she does. “I test it all out in my own home,” Madden says. “People come to my house and see my priceless antiques, my artwork and books, and my furniture for JCPenney is right there, fits right in. It works. I approve every piece.”

For designers, the right deal can be a catapult to national or even worldwide fame. O’Brien, a kind of cult figure among socialites and celebrities who use his design services and visit Aero, his upscale Manhattan shop, was relatively unknown to the rest of the world until last month, when Target’s ad blitz began saturating magazines and TV. “In six months he’ll be a household name,” Beemer says.

Creativity and affordable design aren’t necessarily attached to big bucks, big chains or even to big-name designers trying to become bigger.

Many times, it’s the independent artist, the total unknown, who comes up with a winning idea.

Architects Scott Flora, 38, and Jerinne Neils, 37, who started out in a rented Venice loft, wanted something punchy on their walls. “But we couldn’t afford the art we liked. It would have cost thousands of dollars,” says Flora.

In 2002, the pair invented Blik (whatisblik.com), a 21st century update of decals -- highly stylized stick-on art, in varying sizes, colors and motifs, and in matte or flat finish. Home specialty stores took notice, recognizing that the wall graphics could transform a room in a matter of minutes for about $40. The wall decals are self-adhesive, and removable -- and there’s a charming collection for kids.

Target also noticed, and recruited the pair to design a special lower-cost collection that went on sale in September.

Something as mundane as a night light can get the creative juices going. Candeloos are night lights that look like cute family pets. The cuddly blob-like shapes are from the firm Vessel (vessel.com), owned by designers Stefane Barbeau and Duane Smith, both 34, of Boston.

“We took the existing technology of rechargeability and applied it to the area of night lights,” Barbeau says. At $48 a pair, they may seem pricey. but they don’t wear out -- and kids may cherish them into adulthood, which is priceless. Adult versions, Candelas, look very much like real candles, shed a similar light, and never fizzle out or drip. Most important, they present no safety hazards.

Since introducing their idea, Vessel has sold about 800,000 of both lamps in such stores as MoMA Design Store, Hammacher Schlemmer and Target.

Barbeau says knockoffs of Candeloos have popped up but fizzled quickly because of poor quality. “We’ve learned that consumers are increasingly able to see through this, and are demanding higher quality in exchange for slightly higher price,” he says.

Affordable high design is sometimes found initially in small specialty stores. That’s the case with Softwall, by Molo Design (molodesign.com), owned by Stephanie Forsythe, 35, and Todd MacAllen, 39.

The two architects needed space dividers in the large Canadian loft where they live and work. They developed the malleable, movable, light-filtering wall made from 400 layers of honeycombed translucent white paper.

Fire retardant and available in different heights, the Softwall can be swerved, curved or configured into various shapes. It expands from 1 inch to more than 25 feet long, and prices start at $580 -- considerably less than construction.

New York’s Museum of Modern Art snapped up a Softwall for its permanent collection, and the wall design recently won the international Index award for its potential to improve lives.

The wall is not meant to be disposable, Forsythe says. “I hope that culturally, people don’t start considering things disposable just because they’re a low price. We must choose things we value, and hang onto them.”

The couple are now working on new paper hybrids for walls, and an expandable sofa that can seat up to 25 people. “Perfect for parties,” she says.

Bettijane Levine can be reached at bettijane.levine@latimes.com