Roughhousing on Big, Rustic Furniture : Design: The latest in home decor is not sissy stuff. The more bullet holes, knots or nicks in the pine, the better.
Forget the English Country Look. The Sante Fe Look. The Garden Look. Macho Style is here.
Country-Western may be the decor of the moment for Real Men (and Real Women). Think cowboy. A chair big enough for Clint Eastwood to kick back in with a glass of whiskey. A log bed for Robert Redford to fling himself onto after a long day of fishing.
It’s pony-skin sofas, blanket-plaid chairs and wagon-wheel chandeliers. Whether inspired by Wyoming log cabins or Navajo weavings or lakeside lodges or Franciscan missions, simpler, gutsier, more-rustic home furnishings are riding high.
Even at the recent semiannual wholesale furniture market here, where the favorite background music was the eerie soundtrack from “Dances With Wolves,” showrooms threw dusty cowboy boots and lariats on top of everything from Shaker-style dining tables to Adirondack hickory rockers to get that buckaroo look.
It’s put-your-feet-up furniture, although preferably feet clad in pointy-toed, snakeskin Tony Lamas boots.
Taking a cue from fashion and Hollywood, many furniture designers and marketers this fall have given the public something they hope will make them reach into their hand-tooled wallets. Call the look “Northern Exposure” gone chuck wagon. It’s distressed leathers, bandanna prints, fringed suede upholstery and funky 1930s style cowboys-on-horseback fabrics. It’s the Old West mixed with a bit of backwoods hand-carving and the unadorned lines of Mission oak.
This is not sissy stuff. The more bullet holes, knots or barbed wire nicks in the pine, the better.
Macho types from John Wayne to Sam Shepard have always looked great in big crackled-leather chairs and blanket plaid sofas. Now, fans of Eastwood can buy what the tough-talking star put in his 22-acre California resort called Mission Ranch, which opened in June.
The 32-room ranch, which adjoins the historic 1771 San Carlos Borromeo Mission, is in the town of Carmel where Eastwood served as mayor from 1984 to 1986 and where he maintains a home. The ranch dates back to the 1850s when it was a dairy farm, and became a well-known local hotel and restaurant in 1937. It had its own Hollywood connection; scenes from the 1959 movie “A Summer Place” were shot there.
When the property was threatened by developers, Eastwood came to the rescue and purchased it in 1986 for a reported $5 million.
Oversize club chairs decorated with branding marks, buttery brown suede chairs with matching ottomans and rusticated iron tables are part of the new 250-piece Mission Ranch Collection. Remember, he did star in “Rawhide.”
Eastwood’s first designer label comes through a marketing arrangement with Edgar B, a Clemmons, N.C., mail-order catalogue owned by J. Edgar Broyhill, who coordinated the design of Mission Ranch. Eastwood will receive royalties from sales, but he would not return phone calls to discuss his latest venture. Why would a busy guy like Eastwood put his name to a furniture line?
“I think he did it to promote the ranch,” says Broyhill. “He is not a commercially minded guy, but this ranch represents something important to him.”
Broyhill did his best to play up Eastwood’s bankable name. After the actor-director hired him to refurbish the place, Broyhill commissioned special pieces under the umbrella of the Mission Ranch Collection, and then created a separate $2 mail-order catalogue and a toll-free number ((800) 225-6589) to sell it to the public.
The furniture ranges from a $379 iron mirror to a $3,344 leather sofa. The boxy look, straight lines and exposed construction of the chunky wood pieces evoke the feel of Arts and Crafts or Mission style of the early 20th Century.
The upholstered pieces are large-scale and weighty. Some of the fabrics were inspired by symbols of the missions and indigenous vegetation of the area such as olives, artichokes and grapes. The collection looks macho enough for Eastwood to lounge in, but too good to toss your smoking gun on.
It’s interesting that one of Hollywood’s biggest names would go into the furniture business. But then, movies and TV shows have done a lot to bolster this latest look. “Lonesome Dove.” “Dances With Wolves.” “Twin Peaks.” “The Last of the Mohicans.” “A River Runs Through It.” “Unforgiven.”
There’s also the popularity of country-Western music by stars like Garth Brooks. And the ongoing love affair with the West that Ralph Lauren, that style-setting cowpoke from the Bronx, goes back to for inspiration in home furnishings and fashion.
A recent book, “True West,” by Christine Mather, highlights American Western style, from religious art to cowboy boots, focusing attention on the rich cultural history of those wide-open Western states.
“People gave up Paris and Rome and they’re going to Yellowstone,” says New York designer Larry Laslo.
“They’re trading in Range Rovers for Ford Explorers,” says Mary Emmerling, a former antiques-shop owner, author and American West enthusiast. She collaborated with Lexington Industries on its new American Country West home-furnishings collection.
“Consumers love this stuff,” says Carl Levine, senior vice president of Bloomingdale’s, who is bullish on cowboys this fall. “They are going to put it in their living rooms and dens and bedrooms and kids’ rooms. The American public wants casual-style furniture in the ‘90s.”
So what can consumers do other than rent a Jeep and hit the Oregon Trail? Manufacturers and stores hope they’ll go shopping. Lane’s 64-piece collection called Big Sky Country offers log cabin and Western looks with pony and longhorn detailing in tables and chairs. There is even a cocktail table made from a big Texas door.
Tell Furniture Co.’s Trails Collection takes woods like cherry, oak and hickory and fashions them into wing chairs upholstered in leather, Conestoga benches and chairs with notched pine-tree motifs.
Lexington Furniture Industries hired Emmerling, the author of 14 books on American antiques and collecting regional country pieces, to help put together an 80-piece collection (it includes everything from Cheyenne console tables to Miss Kitty’s bed).
Emmerling was born in Georgetown, but once lived in North Dakota. She is a style editor at Country Living magazine. Her accessory collection for Guild Master is made up of a dizzying 308 items, from $45 cast resin pine cone candlesticks to $895 star-theme hammered iron tables.
“I think people want to have fun again,” says Emmerling. “This is Western-influenced but it is basically good country furniture. I didn’t want it to be cutesy.”