DESIGNING DUO
Five years ago, furniture designers Jeffrey Goodman and Steven Charlton lived in a house with butterscotch-colored walls, flea-market dining chairs slipcovered to look like medieval banners and their own gilt-legged chairs and ottomans upholstered in damask and velvet. Their next home, which they just sold, looked radically different. The walls of this two-story, 1950s Donna Reed traditional in the hills above Sunset Plaza were awash in varying tones of what Goodman, a Harvard-educated painter, calls “new avocado” to complement rooms filled with the designers’ new Duo line of clean-edged blond-wood furnishings.
These modernist-inspired pieces in maple, anigre and oak may or may not be a bellwether for late ‘90s design, but they do represent a surprisingly pared-down aesthetic from the designers who made a name for themselves with furniture like the “Dervish,” a sensuously curved high-back chair topped by a tassel. “We wanted to go much simpler with a ‘40s sense of modern and streamline with luxurious fabrics,” explains Charlton, a former graphic designer. “A few years ago, I couldn’t design anything with a straight line. Today, I can’t draw anything without using a ruler.”
To be sure, a few pieces from Goodman and Charlton’s original collection--ottomans in the form of giant snails and a floor lamp with an S-shaped base--remain in the designers’ personal mix. Only now, their jewel tones have given way to creamy blonds, taupes and bronzy mosses, with hothouse tangerine and chartreuse reserved for accessories. Similarly, ornate damask and brocade have been replaced by sleeker silk and leather and tactile chenille. There isn’t much pattern in sight either. “We don’t want to interfere with the lines of the furniture,” Charlton says. “A beautiful wood surface with a clean line or a beautiful arm stitched in leather is decoration enough.”
Goodman and Charlton have seen the future and, for them, it means not only going for baroque. While they continue to sell their flamboyant first line, they’re also adapting to a lighter, leaner age--just in time for decorating the 1950s modern-style glass house they recently purchased and for the March opening of SEE (Spatial Environmental Elements), a Beverly Boulevard branch of a New York store that will feature their work and design studio. “Our furniture is evolving,” as Goodman puts it. “We’re moving toward this very pure design. It’s an antidote to the ‘80s, when a lot of stuff was over-designed.”