A Modern Touch for Middle America
Rob Forbes is a modern-day furniture sleuth.
He spends his time searching for contemporary furniture designers in Europe--Spain, Italy, Scandinavia, Germany and Belgium.
Last year, Forbes, who started the Design Within Reach furniture catalog in July 1999, was intrigued by a chair he found in a San Francisco restaurant-equipment warehouse.
“I saw the elegance and simplicity of the product, and I said: ‘This is great--exactly the kind of stuff that we want to sell that people haven’t discovered.’ ”
He turned the seat upside down to find the manufacturer--which is how he found himself in Norton, Kan., paying a call on New Age Industrial Inc., which makes aluminum food-service equipment.
“We walked in,” Forbes recalled, “and they had these incredible designs--chairs that were extruded aluminum and vinyl upholstery backs and seats, like an upside-down-U chair. They were in stitches that we thought what they were using in their lunchroom we could put in our catalog along with Herman Miller furniture.”
Forbes said he is hammering out a deal with the company and hopes to include the chair in his San Francisco-based mail-order catalog, which aims to make well-designed contemporary furniture as easy to get as the pots and pans in a Williams-Sonoma catalog.
Design Within Reach is not the only catalog out there for people seeking modern furniture without using an interior designer.
Full Upright Position, a Portland, Ore.-based catalog business, was founded by Deborah Starr in January 1993. Like Design Within Reach, Full Upright Position features modern, early- to mid-20th-century furniture, including icons such as the Eames lounge chair and ottoman, Noguchi coffee table, Nelson bench/table and marshmallow sofa.
Shannon Loughrey, who, with husband Peter Loughrey, runs L.A. Auctions (specializing in 20th-century decorative arts with an emphasis on Eames), says that catalogs such as these “are great because they carry and are taking such important designs to a new level by introducing the modern designs to middle America--to people who, otherwise, would not have access to the pieces.”
An original Eames lounge chair and ottoman, vintage 1950-1980, according to Loughrey, would fetch from $2,000 to $3,500 at auction. (When they first came on the market in 1956, a new Eames lounge and ottoman sold for about $550.) Design Within Reach sells the same chair and ottoman, made by the licensed manufacturer Herman Miller Furniture Co. in Michigan, for $1,975 for the chair and $750 for the ottoman. The pieces are also available through the Full Upright Position catalog for about the same price. While other outlets--such as the Museum of Modern Art catalog and some furniture stores--sell modern pieces, these two catalogs stand out because they specialize in modern works.
Forbes, who grew up in South Pasadena in the 1950s, said he’s seen a resurgence in interest in modern furniture in the past three years, and that his business has exceeded expectations. A Design Within Reach showroom is slated to open in San Francisco on Thursday. The company, which claims that 90% of its orders are shipped within two days, also has a Web site at https://www.dwr.com.
Starr, 36, who operates a showroom in Portland, Ore., said she was inspired by her mother, who had very specific furniture aspirations but was unable to fulfill them. “I remember having an empty living room for most my childhood,” she said, “because she couldn’t afford the furniture that she wanted.” Starr said that memory drives her to work hard with customers to help them figure out what they really want.
Mindful that the Modern furniture movement came out of a desire to use industrial production to make the best design affordable to the general market, Forbes’ Design Within Reach catalog offers mostly American-made industrial products, such as metal stools designed originally for factories or hospitals.
L.A.-based interior designer Janeen Swing acknowledged that customers use the catalogs to add modern touches to their homes without having to pay markups usually charged by interior designers. “Anybody can buy this stuff and get designer prices,” she said. But designers also use the catalog, said Swing. Her experiences with Design Within Reach have been positive. Last July, she ordered 150 of the catalog’s “Doctor No” chairs and was pleased when the order arrived in one week, instead of the month it often takes to receive furniture after placing an order.
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Candace Wedlan can be reached at candace.wedlan@latimes.com.
