A Winning Beginning
The first Furniture Design Award to be given by the American Institute of Architects/LA Chapter has gone to a young Los Angeles firm for its debut collection.
City Studio, at 8444 Melrose Ave., which unveiled its Modernist Collection this year, is the furniture winner in the LA Chapter’s Interior Architecture & Design Competition for 1998.
A total of eight awards for interior architecture and design will be presented at a ceremony Oct. 26 at the Getty Center. City Studio was chosen by a Boston-based jury, which praised the collection’s craftsmanship and vision.
“They have a definite vocabulary,” said juror Jorge Silvetti, dean of architecture at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.
The studio’s inaugural collection features original chairs, lamps, tables and desks in elegant woods and veneers. Using historical motifs as a starting point, the design is characterized by a sharp, straightforward style that emphasizes geometric lines.
“We started off by taking antiques that appealed to us and making reproductions that were filtered through our own sensibilities,” says City Studio’s Toby Mazzie, who developed the collection with Tony Fernandez. “Now we have matured into our own designs rather than reproductions.”
Looking to the past for inspiration from such designers as Pierre Legrain and Frank Lloyd Wright, Mazzie and his team have combined those philosophies with everything from African tribal influences to the Iberian motifs that influenced Picasso in his early Cubist works.
Fernandez has since left the company, which Mazzie formed three years ago, after several years of working for antique dealers.
“I was influenced by antique reproductions,” he said. “When I was younger my family traveled quite a bit, including trips to Africa, and that has always influenced me. We now have a design team of four working on our furniture.”
“We always worked along clean lines,” Mazzie said. “It has been a matter of taking all these philosophies and reinterpreting them but remaining truthful to the purity of design.
“I was in disbelief at winning the AIA award,” he added. “It is a new category, which makes it particularly exciting.”
AIA/LA interior design awards have been presented for three years. The furniture award was the brainchild of Michael Hricak of Rockefeller/Hricak Architects in Venice.
“What we really are celebrating is design in Los Angeles and the many facets of it,” he said. “Los Angeles is not usually thought of as a center for furniture design--that’s New York or Milan or Paris--but there’s a lot going on here, and we certainly deserve attention. Excellent furniture is a part of our tradition and our ancestry.”
City Studio’s collection can be seen at several locations throughout the country as well as the Melrose showroom.
“A lot of stuff that comes out of L.A. is very trendy and of the moment,” said Hricak. “What’s interesting about this line is that it has a timeless quality. It’s both fresh and familiar at the same time, and that’s tough to do.”
