Crazy for Custom

Step inside Pearl Maremont’s Montana Avenue store, Raw Style, and it’s obvious this isn’t your ordinary furniture shop. It’s a riot of color and a mishmash of shapes and designs, from the hand-painted chair decorated with dizzying rows of dots to the handmade ceramic bank shaped like a toaster and the table with faux marble top that looks, even on close scrutiny, like the real thing.

“People say, ‘What do you call it?’ ” Maremont says. “I just say, it’s ‘anti-style.’ It’s going against what’s expected, putting totally contradictory objects together to create style and balance.”

It’s also part of a growing trend in American interiors: filling homes with furniture, accessories and decorative items that are handcrafted and one-of-a-kind.

This is not about crocheted toilet paper covers, which to some are still the embodiment of handmade crafts. It is about skilled artisans who work in wood, glass, clay, metal, textiles and other media to create unique, often functional, home furnishings.

It’s anticookie-cutter decorating. For years homeowners and apartment dwellers felt secure only if every inch was decorated in American country, cottage style or contemporary.

They’re becoming bolder now, mixing tribal masks with antique Wedgwood. Credit the popularity of the Home & Garden Television cable channel, an increased interest in antiques and vintage items, and the scads of high-gloss shelter magazines, all of which encourage individual style and eclecticism.

Margaret Kennedy, editor of House Beautiful, offers another explanation: “This counteracts the sensibility of everything being so high-tech. I was recently at a furniture show in New York, and a lot of the participants started out thinking they would be architects but suddenly discovered the creativity of working with their hands. I think it’s an antidote to technology, and the appreciation of these things is being reassessed.”

Maremont agrees.

“You practically have no contact in any way with humanity anymore,” she says. “This gives you that. There’s someone doing this with their hand, their thought, their love.”

Relief from technology is precisely what one customer wanted when he came to Carl Mueller’s Piecemaker store on 3rd Street near the Beverly Center, which features his designs of handmade, hand-painted Shaker-style pine furniture.

Mueller recalls the day this “total techno guy” wandered in looking for a place to stash his arsenal of stereos, VCRs and other heavy-metal audio-visual items.

“He wanted something where the doors would shut and he could have his things disappear,” Mueller says. “He wanted a simple piece to look at, and wood grain is so nice. It’s timeless.”

Not all crafted furnishings fit into the “country” realm; artists work in everything from contemporary to classic to ethnic to Victorian styles.

“You can have any look you want,” Kennedy explains, “and there is a design somewhere that will fit with your look, whether it’s minimalism or traditional.”

Taking the concept even further, some artists will create custom designs for the home, garden or office. And if that’s not enough one on one, some store owners with interior design backgrounds will advise customers on how to integrate these one-of-a-kind pieces with their existing furnishings.

“Sometimes a customer will commission an artist to do a certain subject matter with certain motifs and color schemes,” explains Denise Saker of the Rosetta Stone Gallery in Los Feliz, which offers artist-made items, plus antiques and imported furniture. “I will often align someone with an artist who can do something that will look wonderful in their homes.”

In the design world, at least, “Support your local artisan” may be the rallying cry of the next millennium. Here are some places to get a head start:

Combining Aesthetics and Practicality

Mueller’s Shaker-style pine furniture is at once unpretentious, warm and sturdy. The traditional Shaker severity is softened with hand-painted folk motifs and distressed patinas executed in muted shades of butterscotch, hunter green, barn red and eggplant. They complement the strong, clean lines of his armoires, tables, chairs, cabinets, dressers and accessories, such as birdhouses, bread troughs, mirrors and trays. (Prices range from $45 to $215 for accessories and from $150 to $700 and up for furniture.) Combining function with aesthetically pleasing, livable design has become his signature.

“I guess it’s my pragmatic side, but I’ve never been big on froufy stuff,” says Mueller, explaining his affinity for Shaker. “It’s a beautiful piece because it’s doing what you want it to do.”

Inspiration for pieces sometimes comes from sheer necessity. His 4-year-old daughter, Claren, was the spark behind the Claren Closet, a vertical cabinet that can hold children’s clothes. As a baby, she inspired a shelf that can hang above a changing table, with ample space for towels, diapers and powder.

Mueller says he enjoys the challenge of designing custom pieces, but occasionally the wood itself guides him: “I used to hand-select every single board, and I found myself praising the wood. These were trees that were 40, 50 years old, and the way they’re cut is the only thing that determines their beauty. And here they are, still being of service to humans. It was kind of a revelation, a respect for the material.”

Mueller, who is also an actor, began making furniture when he was low on cash and needed a chair. Friends started to notice his work, word spread, and eventually he opened a studio-showroom on Pico Boulevard. Two years ago, he moved the showroom to 3rd Street, and he continues to design pieces while taking acting jobs.

“Acting is a flicker on a screen and you’re gone,” he says. “But working with your hands is a nice balance. It’s tangible, and there’s satisfaction in that.”

Mixing Art and Unique Furniture

Part furnishings store, part art gallery, the Rosetta Stone Gallery is the result of a shared vision of two women intent on bringing more than just furniture to the masses.

“We wanted to have a more multicultural approach,” says Denise Saker, who co-owns the store with Kim Mendoza. The two met years ago through business relationships.

“I have a very kind of classic taste, but I also do like an eclectic approach, although I keep it more understated. Kim likes a bunch of stuff mixed together--she’s more of a risk-taker in that way. But we agree on the way we put things together. We both have a very artistic eye.”

Adds Mendoza: “I think we complement each other.”

The result is a collection that includes intricate handmade Victorian lamps with detailed beading by Kathleen Caid (about $800 and up); Kimberly Jordan’s tile portraits (about $2,300) and charcoal drawings (about $225); mixed-media works by Charles Grant (about $300); iron sculptures by Robert Moore ($1,500 and up); modern, almost surreal lamps by Barry Markowitz ($50 to $3,000); leather sculptures and masks by Dragan Milev ($175 to $1,500); and furniture from Europe and Asia.

“Including the furniture with the art was my thing,” Mendoza explains. “We wanted to show our customers that they can actually incorporate more modern works with traditional European pieces.”

Mendoza, whose background is in promotions, combs the city for artists and produces gallery exhibitions at the store.

Their customers, says Saker, an artist who has studied and taught art, “know what’s out there. They read the magazines, they see what’s going on, and they do have an aesthetic sense of how to fit things together. They want less commercial and more specialized. They want something just a little bit custom.”

That’s why artists like Kimberly Johnson of Los Angeles do powerful tile portraits but also will custom tile a pool.

Says Saker, “People come by here all the time to just hang out. They want to sit down and chitchat. I think that’s wonderful. They say they feel like they’re in their living room.”

She Found a Market for Handmade Items

Nancy Goubran was in a home furnishings store one day admiring some decoupaged, crackle-finished lampshades when she found herself uttering these prophetic words: “I could do that.”

A few days later she was, indeed, doing that, in her own kitchen. She and then-partner Bonnie Paul made the prototypes for what is now Nancy Goubran Home Accents.

Besides lampshades, the line includes trays, waste baskets and tissue box covers, all decoupaged with intricately cut fabric pieces (mostly florals), and then crackle-finished. (Approximate prices range from $50 to $200 for lampshades, $75 for tissue holders and $200 for trays; they’re available at Bungalow in Laguna Beach, Salutations Ltd. in Brentwood, Addie’s in Encinitas, Nandu in Santa Monica and Maison Luxe in Manhattan Beach.)

The workshop is a Westwood penthouse apartment, unfurnished except for the shelves and tables that hold items ready to be primed, decorated or shipped.

Goubran and Paul, who were co-workers in the L.A. garment business before starting this company more than a year ago (Goubran designing dresses, Paul selling), recently split. Goubran held on to the business and plans to add other items, such as wall mirrors.

It’s been an education, from dealing with small shops and their owners, to finding out what customers are hungry for.

From the outset the pieces met with raves from store owners and customers--evidence that there was a market for handmade furnishings.

“People ask for various products,” Goubran says, “so you know you can’t have just one. You can’t stay in the same spot. Some of these stores feel they’re fashion-conscious, so they’re always on to the next thing. If you don’t evolve your product, you’re way behind the crowd.”

But there is satisfaction in running your own show. Says Goubran, “I like having the creativity applied to the work.”

She Dreamed of Having a Gallery-Type Store

Pearl Maremont insists on calling the men and women whose furnishings crowd her store artists.

“To me that’s the natural thing,” she says. “This is what they do for a living.”

She has more than 50 artists from around the country represented in her Santa Monica store, including June McCloskey, who adorns furniture and decorative items with bright, layered dots ($25 to about $1,000); ceramic artist Pati Holly, who creates fat, rounded piggy banks shaped like handbags, shoes, animals and toasters (about $65 and up); Joseph Somers, whose “functional art” pieces include a chest of drawers that looks like stacked suitcases (about $4,500); Debbi Tivens, who specializes in tole painted furniture ($225 to $5,000); Ralph Garrett / Shoestrings, who does exclusive, colorful, hand-painted furniture ($175 to $5,000); and paintings by Ann Krasner ($300 to $5,000).

“Most everything has a function,” Maremont explains as she strides through the small but well-stocked store. “That’s my preference. Because people will walk in and say, ‘I need a wonderful little table for the side of the bed,’ and they want a little color, and maybe this will be their one handmade piece.”

This former interior designer (she still does a scant few jobs a year) admits she’s “always been into crafts” and sees the rest of the country now sharing her passion.

Maremont even designed a line of pieced suede slipcovers a few years ago, but felt she had another calling.

“I always had a dream,” she says, “that one day I’d have a gallery-type store. So what I did was combine interior design with crafts.” She finds that customers often have an emotional response to certain pieces, fixating on them instantly.

She combs craft shows to find artists, while others simply wander into her store with their work. Maremont “goes on gut” when deciding which artists to carry.

“There’s an energy in here. The artists--their lives are in here.”