Totahly New
Artist Larry Totah, who achieved national attention for his trend-setting interiors for Melrose boutiques Maxfield and People and Beverly Hills restaurant Noa Noa, also designs furniture: sensuous, undulating forms that reject popular, hard-edge modernism. Totah’s soft, rippling Ribbon breakfast table and bumpy Cake sofa introduce a more playful and romantic look. “I’m bored with the rigidity of furniture,” Totah says. “There’s a great deal of exploration that can be done with curved lines that hasn’t even been touched yet.”
Says Lois Lambert, director of the Gallery of Functional Art: “Totah’s work is not cold: It’s warm. It’s fanciful. He combines contemporary design with the eye of the artist.”
Totah, 35, a soft-spoken man who grew up in Texas and started painting when he was 5, has been something of a renegade all his life. “I got a lot of bad grades in school because I always contested the academic point of view. I kept asking, ‘Why this way?’ ”
It was a question Totah posed often as co-owner of Cozmopole--an influential L. A. salon of artist-inspired furnishings from around the world--which disbanded two years ago. And it’s a question he continues to explore with his own company, Totah Design Inc. Totah takes ordinary, traditional furniture and reinterprets it with unexpected color, material and form. Take his futuristic birch Adirondack chair finished in red aniline dye: Totah calls it Humpty Dumpty because it resembles an egg sitting on a fence--an artistic version of an old classic. “I want an element people can relate to--an association with history--something from our past,” he says.
Working with a modern-day craftsman ethic--much of his furniture must be worked by hand--he mixes copper, steel, wrought iron, aluminum, exotic woods and unorthodox fabrics. The legs of his Cake sofa are sheathed in gold leaf; an elegant Wave sofa wears a cerise neoprene bodysuit, but a love seat is covered with a Greek flokati rug. “It has such movement,” he says. “I like the fuzzy edge.”
Furniture backdrops: Bill Rangel
