Custom Blends

As the century wanes, every furniture design from the past is floating to the surface like debris from a shipwreck. Looking for Victorian, early American, Art Deco, 1950s, ‘60s and on and on? You can find both the real and the repro.

Yet, at the same time, new ideas in contemporary furniture design are taking shape all over the world. Paris-based Australian Marc Newson creates fiberglass shell chairs with electrostatically upholstered blue flock. Briton Ron Arad’s F.P.E. chair (fantastic, plastic, elastic) on an extruded aluminum frame fitted with a thermoplastic seat bent into a stacking-chair shape was the hit of the 1997 Milan Furniture Fair. The constant theme in these cutting-edge designs is the use of high-tech and synthetic materials with a reference to the past.

Twenty-nine-year-old Angeleno Elizabeth Paige Smith is one of these new young designers who is pushing the limits. What makes her especially unusual is that she’s a woman in a traditionally male field. Looking like a high-fashion model and talking like an technical engineer, Smith is a force to be reckoned with. She introduced her first custom furniture collection at the 1996 International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York; praised by critics, her six-piece collection in soft colors with minimal compositions became an overnight success.

But her passion for putting things together and creating functional forms had started much earlier. “Even as a kid growing up in the Cayman Islands, I built model cars and furniture for my Barbies,” she says. “I was always trying to create something usable.”

Smith had lived in the Caribbean since she was 10 years old, when she and her mother left Houston. “My mother was vacationing there, met my stepfather, fell in love, quit her job and moved. For me, it was real culture shock.” She credits this abrupt change of lifestyle--leaving a large house for a small cottage--with fostering her independence. “It was such a strong contrast that it taught me to move freely. Now I find it very easy to adjust to any situation,” she says in a soft but determined voice.

In 1987, she pulled another culture change by moving to the Midwest where she graduated from the University of Kansas’ School of Design. Then it was on to California, a place where design innovations are in the air and high-tech materials abundant.

Not too surprisingly for a furniture designer, when the confessed workaholic does relax she gets on a piece of wood and surfs. “Through that I fell in love with balsa wood that was carved to create the classic surfboards of the 1930s and ‘40s. Surfboards also got me interested in resin finishes.”

It wasn’t long before she found what she was looking for in the way of construction materials. “I got my original inspiration here when I was introduced to some high-tech junkyards that had remnant pieces of cast aluminum, copper and balsa from the aerospace industry. I could find panels and pieces of materials that really interested me as far as texture and color,” she explains.

Still, she wasn’t satisfied with the harsh and often rugged detailing that was left over when she worked with found objects. She refined the pieces by adding new materials or transforming the found objects into other forms. “Nowadays I don’t go back and look for found objects. Now it’s pure sculpture from the ground up,” Smith says.

One substance she works with is a core material from the aerospace industry, compressed balsa wood, that is used for subflooring on airplanes. With this she creates geometric cube tables that from a distance look like butcher blocks. Yet they go beyond that with the addition of several coats of resin in white or natural colors that make them sturdy and translucent at the same time. It is the wood grain, the color and the resins that soften the ultra-minimalist look and make the tables able to fit into almost any decor.

“In this case I wanted the layering of the wood and the resin finish to still maintain the elegance and warmth of wood, even though pressed balsa wood has never been seen as an aesthetic material before.”

Smith orders the wood from distributors and then sometimes hires people to follow her plans and fashion it into furniture or sometimes does it herself.

Another thing she does is to take poplar plywood slabs and bend them into lounge chairs. These also are coated with resins to give them a finished, high-sheen surface, but still with the warmth that she considers essential. “There are contradictions involved in the materials I’m working with. The wood is natural, but then the resins take it away from being totally of the earth. You can see the wood grains, but you see them through resins. I think that element is what shocks some people.”

It is this ability to combine both the old and the new that intrigues Boston furniture collector Yvon Guillaume. “There are very few young designers doing the kind of work she does. She has a sensibility that takes things from the past and looks at them in a different way. The difficulty is to strike a balance between the commercial and artistic. Smith leans more toward the artistic approach.”

Certainly art is a big part of her life. She has a bicoastal relationship with video artist / producer Doug Aitken, whom she credits both with understanding her work and supporting her in it, important qualities since she usually works alone in her one-room studio off Robertson Boulevard.

But although her approach is sculptural, her furniture is scaled for comfort, not for museums. One of her most successful pieces is the “Maria Stringer” chair, which is a whimsical interpretation of the 1950s pinup girl with open arms and sensuous curves. The chair is constructed on a hardwood frame with loose down-filled seat cushions upholstered in soft cotton velvet. The voluptuous body stands on aluminum legs like stiletto heels.

“I’m attracted to working three-dimensionally, hands-on. . . . Right now I’m particularly interested in the effect of light on the work I’ve created and I’m intrigued by architecture. The idea of redefining the spaces we inhabit really excites me.”

In that Smith is in line with the architects / designers of the past. “The grandest furniture throughout history has always been about the surface: mosaic, gilded, marquetry,” says Martin Chapman, curator of European Decorative Arts at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. “The surface is also important in this new modernism in furniture design. We are heading for a period which could be called ‘baroque,’ since the designers are not afraid of the past, but they don’t feel the need to be faithful to the materials they use. Frank Gehry’s museum in Bilbao, Spain, is an example of that baroque attitude. For many, retro is simply not on.”

This idea of something new happening hasn’t been around for a while, so it’s refreshing to hear it. “There are exciting things happening in furniture design with the addition of African and Japanese elements as well as unusual materials,” says Guillaume. “It is really a very optimistic time.”

Prices for Smith’s furniture range from $600 for side tables to $3,000 for a custom sofa. They can be found at Zipper in L.A. and at Totem in New York City.