He rethinks function and form, at work and at home
STUART KARTEN racks his brain dreaming up products to make life easier. Want to snooze in your car for a few minutes in between appointments? Karten conceived an automobile tricked out with dimming windows, an air purifier that pumps out relaxing scents and a footrest that pops over the pedals.
Karten, you see, is an industrial designer hired to rethink the form and function of electronics, lifesaving medical equipment and other gadgets. Some of his concepts, such as silicone-tipped kitchen tongs that double as a long spoon, actually reach production. Then there are loftier ideas -- that car-as-recliner is one -- that linger as merely pies in the sky.
But when his attention shifts to his Venice home, practicality overrules wondrous what-ifs. Here, his focus is on sculptural but effective sink stoppers, unconventional closets and tidy desks with hidden compartments. The two-story clapboard house holds a collection of simple devices and solutions for everyday living that Karten has conceived for one discriminating client: himself.
“I try to design things that are aesthetically pleasing but that don’t compromise comfort, durability or meeting real needs,” says Karten, a man on a mission to make his 1,700-square-foot contemporary home bright and efficient.
He borrowed a few feet of daughter Rachel’s bedroom and converted underused spaces -- an upstairs hallway and part of an outdoor deck -- into what is now the most popular place for his family to hang out, the den.
He admits the room did have one drawback: Walk up the stairs and you’d look straight into a nest of cords under his maple desk.
“It’s usually just accepted that you will see a big mess of wires in a home office,” says Karten, who designed a false panel that hangs 2 1/2 inches in front of the desk’s back panel. Hidden in between are all the power plugs and ports.
The master bedroom had a blocky, 5-foot-wide walk-in closet. Now, there’s a vaulted ceiling and an open sitting area with Eero Saarinen’s Womb chair -- “a beautiful sculpture that facilitates multiple sitting positions, all comfortably,” Karten says.
“After we changed the flat ceiling into a vaulted one, I kept thinking that we didn’t want to build another box for a closet and enclose this new area, so we left it open,” he says. For a while, he and wife Vickie lived with clothes racks by the bed.
Then, Karten recalls, “I thought about a vertical closet with a ladder to reach the seldom-needed top items.” Concealed behind floor-to-ceiling walnut doors are new clothes racks that hover 13 feet high. Open the doors, and two tiers of storage are just wide enough to accommodate suit jackets.
“The closet retained the dramatic feeling of the remodeled room and gave us the opportunity to introduce walnut to white walls,” he says. He bought trapezoidal walnut dressers from Ted Boerner along with matching metal handles for the closet doors, which a cabinetmaker built.
The next problem: The master bath didn’t have an exterior window. Karten’s solution was to create the illusion of one: an interior clerestory window draws in natural light from the bedroom’s French doors.
The charcoal-gray counters and seamless sinks are made of the cement-based Syndecrete. Karten didn’t want a pop-up drain. (“It seems antiquated to pull up and press down a rod,” he says.) And those rubber stops? Well, they’re not leak-proof or very attractive.
He couldn’t find what he wanted at hardware supply stores, so he bought two hard rubber balls, and at his Marina del Rey design studio he inserted a chrome stem that matched the wall-mounted Vola faucet lever. When not in use, the stoppers sit in grooves on the custom counter.
In his studio, Karten and his team perform ergonomic analysis and ethnographic research before building prototypes of Bluetooth headsets, injection-molded plastic binders and defibrillators. At home, the designer usually doesn’t have that much time. “We’re usually motivated when we’re planning a party,” he says.
Take the window shades. Minutes before company arrived, Karten was experimenting with simple white fabric roller shades. He wanted a sleek valance for a more finished look. His solution: An aluminum bar typically used as a machinery part.
Another problem solved.
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