BY DESIGN : Interior Motives : At Pieces, the furniture comes in . . . pieces. And each work of art pulls double duty: Think of dining tables as desks and you’ll get the picture.
Need a desk with a built-in rumble seat? A dining table that--poof!--becomes a desk and two side tables?
Step into Pieces, the Melrose Avenue custom-furniture store of Michael Dean Hackett and Dianne Carr. Inside the 3,600-square-foot minimalist shop, the longtime friends have created what resembles a Japanese meditation garden that gives way to white gallery walls, high open-beam ceilings and concrete floors.
The furniture in Pieces is an eclectic mix of contemporary hand-made furnishings, hand-painted screens and artwork that come in pieces. Think of Transformers, those robot-like child’s toys that transform from robots into race cars and other assorted objects, and you’ll have a pretty good notion of Pieces’ approach to household design.
“I’ve always been fascinated with hidden things,” says Hackett, a Kansas City, Mo., native who studied design at the Royal Melbourne Institute in Australia, then returned to the United States to pursue careers in architecture, interior design, painting and illustration.
“I remember growing up in the Midwest where all the houses had built-in safes. And I was just really intrigued by the whole concept.”
Hackett, 48, spends his days in the shop’s back room, churning out $12,600 tables with built-in rumble seats, $3,525 side tables with detachable serving trays, $4,100 chairs with hidden storage tables, and $22,000 dining tables that double as consoles and desks. Carr, 53, a Beverly Hills homemaker-turned-businesswoman, is busy explaining the method behind what appears to be furniture madness.
“The basic idea wasn’t to create a $10,000 piece of furniture, but to design something that was unique, really well constructed and something you would look at as a piece of art,” she says.
“A lot of it is the playfulness more than the complexity of it all,” Hackett says. “I usually start out drawing something very complex. And then I start toning it down to something that serves a real function.”
Carr says Hackett’s gift for design comes from ignoring convention. “You and I might think it’s crazy, but Michael wouldn’t hesitate to pick up a piece of furniture we might think is beautiful, take a saw to it and create something else with six or eight parts that winds up being much more spectacular,” she says.
For example, almost every piece of furniture in the space features an unusual pull or knob made from rocks, gem stones, knife holders and even belt buckles. A buffet cabinet has hidden shelves with specially designed silver push pins for handles. A pair of stacking chests uses vintage earrings as drawer knobs.
“It’s all about taking things out of context,” says Hackett, noting that many of his designs are inspired by the Czechoslovakian Cubist movement. “Some time I’d like to be able to slip the jewelry off, wear it and then be able to put it back on a cabinet.”
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Hackett says he never thought much about functional design until he took a fall from an artist’s ladder three years ago while painting a second-story mural outside Carr’s home.
“He broke both his hands and his leg, so basically he was totally helpless,” recalls Carr, who converted her pool house into a guest cottage during Hackett’s three-month incapacitation. “Every time I turned around, Michael would have some contraption set up just so he could do the simplest things, like pour himself a cup of coffee or get around the room without putting pressure on his leg.”
The idea of creating an entire collection of dual-purpose furniture was born a short time later. After the store opened in January, additional artwork by local artists Robert Waters and Anne Oftedal (ceramics), Lance Lundborg (glass and found objects) and Gary Chapman (clay sculpture) were added to the mix.
Although most of the store’s designs are gorgeous and graceful, there have been a few disasters, such as the $5,000 wooden storage bench designed to rest at the end of a bed. “People thought it looked like a coffin,” Carr says. It was eventually bought by German tourists.