CLASSIC Knockoffs : Reproductions That Celebrate Modernism’s Return

Nowadays, the bizarre shapes and kooky colors of Memphis furniture appear dated, English-style rooms look cluttered, and Louis-the-whatever fauteuils seem either pretentious or terribly grand. Even that constant Southern California standby, Southwest decor, is becoming stale. So what happens when popular decorating styles grow tired? Design trends inevitably return to Modernism.

This once-revolutionary minimalist style, which swept aside centuries-old traditions of European ornamentalism when it was introduced in the first decades of the 20th Century, never seems to wear out its welcome. Hastened by the speedy rise and fall of whimsical, sometimes-kitschy Post-Modernism during the last 10 years, it is back again. In response to this growing demand, Southern California stores offer reproductions of Modernist classics, including chairs, tables, lamps and even vases.

On the face of it, Modernism’s continuing success seems surprising. Why should a style inspired largely by the need to inexpensively house German and Austrian workers dispossessed by World War I appeal to today’s affluent consumers? The answer is simple: because Modernist furniture looks so good in contemporary houses. Whether one calls home a high-rise apartment in Bunker Hill Towers or a hacienda-inspired, stucco house in Orange, most people live in rectangular rooms where only the plainest of baseboards and moldings enliven the white-painted walls--exactly the setting the Modernists designed for. Southern Californians warm to Modernism for another reason: The movement’s clean-lined furnishings offer visual respite from urban hustle and bustle as well as the region’s hot colors and desert heat.

Among the great figures in 20th-Century furniture, the earliest was Scottish architect and interior designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh, who blended the old, curvaceous art nouveau sensuality with a new, crisp rectangularity. Mackintosh’s 1902 ladder-back Hill House chair, in ebonized ash, has a fairy-tale quality. Seat pad notwithstanding, this chair is built for looks rather than comfort. Think of it as a sculptural essay on verticality.

The Hill House chair is one of those ambiguous talismans that appears every so often in the history of art, offering inspiration to the following generation. Its bony structure can be found, fleshed-out and masculinized, in the tall slats of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie chair, designed for Wright’s 1908 Robie house in Chicago.

Viennese architect Josef Hoffmann also was a Mackintosh devotee. It seems that he gazed long and lovingly at the checkerboard grid atop the Hill House chair because the pattern became a Hoffmann idee fixe , especially for his metal-grid accessories. Italy-based Bieffeplast reproduces Hoffmann ashtrays, vases and wastepaper baskets. The fruit bowl, available in white or black at about $135, or a diminutive Vienna hexagonal vase, at $95, offers an economical entree into historic reproductions.

What Mackintosh did for lines, Gerrit Thomas Rietveld did for planes. As World War I ended, a group of Dutch painters known as de Stijl introduced a rigorously abstract style, reducing shapes to geometric verticals and horizontals, with colors limited to the three primaries--red, blue and yellow--plus black, white and gray. Piet Mondrian was the best-known member of de Stijl , and interior designers during the ‘50s and ‘60s brightened their spare, disciplined compositions of Modernist furniture with walls of bold, primary “Mondrianesque” colors. The Red-Blue Chair by Rietveld, built in 1917, translates a Mondrian canvas into three dimensions. It’s the overstuffed Victorian seat on a starvation diet.

Speaking of painters, who better evokes Vienna in 1900 than Gustav Klimt? His famous canvas of two lovers embracing, known as “The Kiss,” conjures up the suppressed emotions and erotic drives that his contemporary Sigmund Freud was then trying to fit into the theory of psychoanalysis. The discs ornamenting Klimt’s sensuous painting find an analogue in the round cutouts perforating the curved back support in the Banker’s Chair, designed in the studio of Viennese art nouveau architect Otto Wagner between 1900 and 1906. A familiar sight to design-conscious consumers is that ubiquitous Bauhaus piece, the Barcelona chair, which Mies van der Rohe designed for the German pavilion at the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition. The celebrated leather seat and back, cradled in a pair of gracefully curving stainless-steel hands, can still be seen in a thousand and one smart lobbies.

Another Modernist favorite, van der Rohe’s S-shaped, tubular steel MR chair, was lampooned by writer Tom Wolfe in “From Our House to Bauhaus.” It was, according to Wolfe, “the second-most-famous chair designed in the century, ‘Mies’s’ town Barcelona chair being first, but also one of the five most disastrously designed, so that by the time the main course arrived, at least one guest had pitched face forward into the lobster bisque.”

Flatten a Barcelona chair, add a giant Tootsie Roll at one end and you get Mies’ celebrated Couch (also called the Tugendhat Day Bed)--although it’s closer to a chaise longue, what with its single cushion and long extended seat bidding the sitter to recline and catch 40 winks. It also claims a California connection: Mies designed the Couch in 1930 for Philip Johnson, architect of Garden Grove’s Crystal Cathedral. Mies’ Couch looks both to the past and the future. The simple abstract form dates back to beds used by the Egyptians. The slender metal legs, however, stand in contrast to the fat-thigh rococo carving of Victorian couch legs of the period, reflecting the ascetic, sparse lines of the International Style that followed.

Le Corbusier’s Grand Confort chair proves that despite all his polemic about pure forms and radiant cities, the pioneering Swiss architect had a sense of humor. Until 1928, sofas and easy chairs meant overstuffed upholstery concealing a wooden frame. Then Le Corbusier designed the Grand Confort, wherein overstuffed upholstery nests inside--instead of surrounding--a spindly metallic frame. In its time, the chair’s appearance seemed a radically daring visual pun to which the ironic name supplied an extra touch of naughtiness.

Le Corbusier’s Irish-born colleague Eileen Gray languished after World War II in ill health and obscurity until 1974, when furniture manufacturers Dario Delmestri and Zeev Aram began producing her designs. She died two years later, at age 97. The glass-topped, round bedside breakfast table she designed for her villa at Roquebrune in 1927 remains an enduring memento of the house at which Le Corbusier accidentally drowned in 1965.

ONCE YOU’VE DECIDED which classic chair or table to buy, you’ll have to decide upon which version. This subject is a can of worms; the price spread can be vast. For example, Atelier International imports the priciest, Italian-made version of Le Corbusier’s Grand Confort, by Cassina. The cost: narrow single-seater in canvas, $4,655; narrow triple-seater in leather, $11,560; wide love seat in leather, $9,270. Cassina worked out a licensing agreement with Le Corbusier shortly before he died and pays royalties to his estate; the fabrics, finishes and configurations are exactly as the master approved them. Each chair comes with a certificate and serial number stamped on the frame.

Sergio Palazzetti, president and founder of his namesake firm, makes copies of classic 20th-Century furniture that are available to the trade (designers and architects) through the firm’s L.A. showroom. He explains the philosophy behind his “non-official” reproductions: “The patents are in the public domain. Paying royalties for the heir’s permission means nothing; for money, they’d say yes to anybody. Instead, for our version, we interviewed Charlotte Perriand, Le Corbusier’s associate, to determine what the chair really looked like.”

Palazzetti offers the Grand Confort in a foam version and a slightly more expensive down-filled version with a higher back, like the prototype. Palazzetti’s price: foam version--narrow single-seater in canvas, $2,817; narrow triple-seater in leather, $8,820; wide love seat in leather, $5,800.

The Grand Confort made by Toronto-based Area Design and available through Boulevard USA in Marina del Rey benefits from the low Canadian dollar. And if you want to order custom finishes--a dozen chairs in pink, say--Area will oblige. Says company vice president Lee Jacobson: “What does original mean? The first Grand Conforts were made of canvas and a painted frame; chrome and leather didn’t appear until the ‘50s. And the quality of the welds was poor; no one would accept it today.” Area’s narrow single-seater in canvas-like wool retails for $2,610; the narrow triple-seater in leather, $6,890; the wide love seat in leather, $5,590.

Atelier International, Palazzetti and Area sell to the trade, but the public is welcome to browse in their showrooms and place orders through an architect or interior decorator. By contrast, the two showrooms of Modern Living, the avant-garde furnishings emporium spun off from John Zabrucky’s Modern Props, sell only at retail. Prices also include freight charges from Italy and delivery to your home. Modern Living offers the Grand Confort in leather only: narrow single-seater $2,370; narrow triple-seater in leather, $4,395; wide love seat in leather, $3,675.

Mies van der Rohe’s Couch manifests an even greater price spread than the Grand Confort. It can be had, in leather, for $3,500 at Modern Living, $6,400 at Palazzetti, and $9,970 at Knoll. True, Knoll pays royalties to the Museum of Modern Art for its Mies Archive Collection, but those stainless-steel legs on the Mies Couch raise Sergio Palazzetti’s hackles: “Stainless steel wasn’t around in 1929, but it’s simpler and cheaper to work with than chrome. Also, the look isn’t the same: Chrome has a long-lived mirror finish, stainless steel stays dull.” Knoll-Studio sales representative Patty Neidermeyer counters that “chrome is cheaper and less labor-intensive.”

The moral of the story? If you’re in the market for reproductions of classic Modernist furniture, shop around: There’s an “original” piece for every budget.

Resources--Furniture reproductions, both licensed and unlicensed, are available at the following Southern California stores and showrooms:

PALAZZETTI: 9008 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles 90048, (213) 273-2225.

AREA DESIGN: Boulevard USA. 310 Washington St., Plaza Complex, Suite 2, Marina del Rey 90266, (213) 823-4711.

NIENKAMPER: Pacific Design Center, Space M11, 8687 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles 90069, (213) 652-4060.

ATELIER INTERNATIONAL Pacific Design Center, Space B230, 8687 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles 90069, (213) 659-9402.

SHELBY WILLIAMS: Pacific Design Center, Space B274, 8687 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles 90069, (213) 657-8687.

MODERN LIVING: 8125 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles 90046, (213) 655-3898; and 4063 Redwood Ave., Los Angeles 90066, (213) 827-2866.

KNOLL INTERNATIONAL: Pacific Design Center, Space B203, 8687 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles 90069, (213) 658-8686. KnollSource dealers include: Office Matrix, 10395 Slusher Drive, Santa Fe Springs 90670, (213) 944-4700; Office Furniture Specialists, 5752 Oberlin Drive, San Diego 92121, (619) 452-3660; Office Furniture Specialists, 320 Golden Shore Drive, Long Beach 90802; (213) 436-9663; En Touch, 9269 Utica Ave., Rancho Cucamonga 91730, (714) 945-1557; Contract Purchasing, 818 W. 7th St., Los Angeles 90017, (213) 622-6621.

SOURCE: 24570 Hawthorne Blvd., Torrance 90505, (213) 373-6146.