The Lean Years : At the WestWeek Show, Tight-to-the-Bone Lines and Changeable Components Define Future Spaces

The Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood opened its doors Wednesday to the 21st century.

Or at least to the by-invitation-only crowd of 15,000 international architects and interior designers who will help shape it. “The Future of . . . “ is a recurring theme at the annual WestWeek symposium now underway here, with seminars that zero in on style, design, architecture, technology, scientific inquiry and conflict resolution.

“Something big is about to happen--it’s the next century,” says Pacific Design CenterPresident Andrew Wolf. “And it won’t be met with an epiphany, but with business as usual.”

So Wolf has inaugurated a five-year plan, “CountUp 2000,” to prep the wholesale design center and its tenants for the millennium. A big part of that grand plan has been to make the public feel welcome in a place viewed only a few years ago as an impenetrable fortress housing a secret society. At the same time, the PDC has courted the local fashion industry in hopes of signing apparel wholesalers to its tenant list. But Wolf abandoned that idea last fall, citing a shrinking list of buyers and the high cost of supporting an industry with five markets a year.

Instead, he has focused on extending the PDC’s welcome mat beyond the Los Angeles County line--south to Mexico and west, across the Pacific Ocean.

Information in Japanese, Chinese and Spanish is now included on signs throughout the center, as well as on the new PDC letterhead. And a new Japanese buying office arranges translators for non-English-speaking customers.

With 16 new hotels now going up in Shanghai, “designed largely by Los Angeles architects,” Wolf says, the PDC has become a gateway to the Pacific Rim marketplace.

Hotel construction is clearly a boon for the PDC showrooms. But it seems that manufacturers have also learned how to make a buck off shrinking businesses.

In anticipation of further downsizing in corporate America, Steelcase, an office furniture company showing its wares during WestWeek, offers components that can be rearranged faster than you can clean out your desk. And if the winners in a hostile takeover don’t like the color scheme in their newly seized high-rise, GF Office Furniture’s desk chairs come with snap-out upholstery in a range of fabrics.

The changing workplace has also captivated Los Angeles architect Rex Beasley. He developed a scheme to convert a space-gobbling, underused boardroom into a multifunctional movable unit. Pick up a touch-tone phone, punch in a few numbers and half the boardroom swings around to instantly create two conference rooms. With this Fluid Architecture concept, Beasley offers 16 configurations for three offices and a boardroom.

For those secure enough in their jobs to take on a major redo of the living room, the newest home furnishings showcased here reflect the times: lean. The overstuffed, slip-covered chairs and sofas of the recent past have made way for pieces with short skirts that show off well-turned legs.

Los Angeles furniture designer Mark Newman hikes up the pleated skirt of his trim Ivar chair to mid-calf, and the floral upholstered bed by Beverly, another Los Angeles-based manufacturer, shows a lot of leg too.

The leggy lines, light-colored woods and tight-to-the-bone tailoring borrows a lot of inspiration from postmodernism. Colors and graphic patterns from the same period turn up in fabric and rug designs.

After WestWeek closes Friday, the center will make good on its open-door policy, with more than 20 exhibitions to be up for a month or more (see related story, E3).

Among the ongoing attractions will be the second coming of IdeaHouse, a hypothetical home that in 1995 drew 17,000 visitors. This year’s model, designed by Joe Ruggerio, was created for a Malibu-based entertainment industry couple and their artistic 8-year-old daughter. Its interior is a techy fantasy land with a state-of-the-art screening room and fiber optic-wired home office for two, complete with editing facilities.

Showcasing the interiors version of software--the design expertise, the accouterments and the images of high style--has become as important to the industry as selling sofas, reports Design Journal, an industry trade publication.

Indeed, the PDC is counting on that kind of exposure, along with a concierge service that facilitates buying from the showrooms and how-to classes, to bring in a new customer. Says Rocky LaFleur, director of business development for the center: “Stanley Marcus created customers who were involved in the process and that’s what we’re trying to do.”