Odd and Ordinary: L.A. Artist Uses His ‘Magic’ on Furniture : Design: Roy McMakin is gaining a reputation for originality. He makes furniture that some call bizarre, yet carries an air of cozy Americana.

A plain glass door on Beverly Boulevard opens into the oddly haunted yet utterly down-home world of Roy McMakin and his Domestic Furniture Co.

An artist who designs furniture, McMakin makes chairs, tables, beds and chests of drawers that are sculptural, slightly bizarre and yet carry an air of cozy Americana. His furnishings share the fusion of ordinariness and oddness that characterized David Lynch’s disturbing small-town movie “Blue Velvet.”

A comfy armchair that looks like it was salvaged from a 1950s hotel lounge trails a dangling rat-like tail. A severe cherry side table inspired by Shaker furniture seems slightly askew, as if its maker’s attention had been momentarily distracted. A mahogany dresser, that could have been crafted by the premier Arts and Crafts designer Gustav Stickley, lacks one drawer.

This seductive oddness is gaining the 33-year-old designer a reputation for originality. “Roy has a vision that goes way beyond merely solving a design problem,” says McMakin client Mark Trilling, president of Slash Records. “He is, for my money, the only contemporary furniture designer who has developed an identity that is unmistakably American in its honesty--an honesty that’s mingled with wry wit and a touch of modest self-mockery.”

Avant-garde architect Fred Fisher, who is collaborating with McMakin on the design of a Tokyo condo development, lauds his furnishings as “pragmatic and restrained yet loaded with personality. This is stuff you can live with. It’s witty and intriguing without being intrusive, which is a tension I strive to achieve in my own work.”

But the furniture does not seem at all tense or strange to the designer himself.

“I’m intrigued by the idea of ‘insideness,’ that should be experienced simultaneously with the ‘outsideness’ of the objects we live with,” he said. “By exaggerating or eliminating conventional elements of furniture, I try to reveal these ideas.”

McMakin trained as a conceptual artist at UC San Diego but soon became dissatisfied with the experience of displaying his art objects in the isolation of a gallery. “Gallery shows don’t bring home the vital knowledge that we live in a world of our own making, where the man-made things that surround us become reflections and incarnations of our personalities. They become us and we become them.”

In the early 1980s McMakin gradually moved from creating props for conceptual art installations to crafting furniture. He said he wanted to make chairs and tables that had the resonance of memory, “like something you saw at your aunt’s when you were a kid. Things that fit passively into a home environment, and comfort the soul and the body with their gentle familiarity.”

When San Diego businesswoman Anne Nugent first saw his chairs and dressers, she was enchanted by the artist-designer’s fascination with furniture as both useful objects and expressions of his feelings about personal environments. So she financed McMakin’s Domestic Furniture store that opened two years ago in Los Angeles.

“Roy’s designs cross the line between furniture and art without losing the energy of either form,” she said. “His things are definitely not meant to be precious objets d’art. They shine with the intellectual aura of the idea of ‘chairness’ yet are perfectly at home in your personal space. I don’t quite know how he manages such subtle magic.”

Nugent backed McMakin because she saw a niche in the market for a new generic American furniture that did not derive its essential character from imported European models. She felt that many clients would appreciate designs that carried echoes of native U.S. furnishings ranging from Arts and Crafts and Shaker to 1930s Art Deco and ‘50s Functional. “Not reinterpretations, or postmodern parodies,” she insisted, “but deeply felt and essentially relived recreations of nostalgic items.”

Nostalgia, however, doesn’t come cheap. A McMakin sofa sells for $5,000, an armchair-with-a-tail for $2,000, a queen-sized white oak bed for $2,500. A simple straight maple dining chair runs $300.

With growing artistic and financial success, McMakin decided to expand with franchises in New York and two other U.S. cities, but earlier last year he reversed this potentially highly profitable decision. “I don’t need a lot of money,” he explained, “so why stretch myself out thin, and make myself miserable into the bargain? Knowing your own limits, respecting your own boundaries, is more than a necessity for sanity, it’s a positive duty.”

McMakin lives modestly, almost puritanically, in a restored 1917 Hancock Park house designed by architect Irving Gill, a California pioneer of early 20th-Century pre-modern design. His furnishings are sparse so they don’t diminish the severity of Gill’s bare white spaces, and the concrete floors, polished to a hard shine, that impart an air of monastic simplicity.

For McMakin, Gill’s architecture has overtones that move him deeply: “It seems to be charged with the element of time, that domesticates whatever was odd or unusual about the work when it first appeared.

“Small, simple houses need to come back in,” said McMakin whose intense gray eyes glint behind the kind of steel-rimmed spectacles worn by the villains in 1940s Gestapo movies. “We need to be more sparing in the way we spend our natural resources. We need to be caring about the natural limits of our environment.”

As an example of this concern, he recently stopped finishing his furniture with the air-polluting petrochemical distillates commonly used in glazing the wooden surfaces. He developed an allergy from the chemical fumes, and that, he said, was a signal from his body that he was abusing the environment.

Despite McMakin’s sensible self-limitation, several of his early patrons fear his newer designs show signs of becoming “baroque.”

Artist Carol Vena-Mondt, who furnished her converted downtown loft with McMakin’s objects five years ago, suggested that his later work tends towards self-parody. “They’re becoming cartoon versions of his wonderfully fresh original designs,” she said. “The details, such as the wittily elegant draw pulls that graced Roy’s earlier chest of drawers, are becoming exaggerated, almost corny. The subversive quality that delighted me back then has become an almost routine gesture.”

Architect Fisher agreed that some of McMakin’s recent furniture “verges on the merely mannered.” He feels that various pieces are getting “noisy” with overwrought details that threaten their original innocence. “I still love Roy’s stuff, and we’re still working together, but now I select his pieces more carefully, on the look out for too much cleverness,” he said.

“At its best Roy’s work is highly personal, with not a shred of campness about it,” observed Fisher. “But when it’s not quite at its best, it risks falling into the abyss of camp that haunts all serious nostalgics.”