Armoires With Attitude

When architect Daniel Janotta isn’t designing office towers, which he does most days of the week as an associate partner at Johnson Fain Partners in downtown Los Angeles, he’s working on lamps with Hawaiian shirt shades and molded plywood chairs in the shape of derrieres.

Working out of a showroom and studio in Hermosa Beach, Janotta filled his nearby home with quirky designs he couldn’t find in stores. Hoping to inspire others at his firm to pursue the fun of ad hoc furniture design, he persuaded 15 of his 72 colleagues to sign up for a workshop at the firm. In six months the group produced 14 items, which will be displayed Oct. 2 through Dec. 5 in “Just Furniture Pieces,” a show at the Los Angeles Craft and Folk Art Museum.

There’s a magazine rack cum high-heeled shoe, a table lamp made from a bicycle fork and an armoire as theater complete with red velvet drapes. Vera Stevanovic-Hetcel designed a birch and brushed aluminum champagne table with computer-generated accuracy; Warren Tamashiro fabricated chairs and tables from cardboard rolls of computer paper; Cynthia Phakos reduced side tables to minimalistic wedges of birch ply; Jen Spangler designed lighting for her brother’s Italian restaurant in St. Louis to mimic pasta ears; Gregory Verabian and a friend, Michael T. Perdue, reinterpreted the ‘50s rolling drinks cart in a modern mode, calling it the Booze-o-Matic 5000. All are fresh takes on familiar household objects, the result of after-work time well spent.