With new La-Z-Boy line, Oldham has no time to kick back
As a child, Todd Oldham spent a lot of time underneath furniture. Born in Corpus Christi, Texas, in the pre-Gymboree 1960s, he used the family La-Z-Boy recliner as an indoor play station, bouncing up and down or “trapping people underneath the footrest.”
At 8 or so, he helped his parents build a slat bench inspired by George Nelson’s classic midcentury design. “My memory of that bench was lying under it rolling a marble up and down the planks for hours on end,” recalls the 42-year-old former fashion designer.
Soon there would be other enthusiasms, such as photography and painting. “I have a huge collection of cosmetics because the colors are so sophisticated,” Oldham says. “I have no drag aspirations and don’t wish to wear this makeup, but as paint it’s spectacular.”
Now the youthful New York designer is putting some of his obsessions to good use with a new line of home furnishings for La-Z-Boy. For Oldham -- known as much, if not more, for his appearances as a decor doctor on MTV’s “House of Style” and the “Today” show as he is for his 1990s youthquake couture -- working with one of the nation’s biggest and oldest furniture manufacturers is a natural second act. “My heart wasn’t in it for fashion anymore,” he says. With furniture, he can design things people need as much as want. “I am not obliged to render what I did six months ago obsolete.”
By the time he sent his last model down the runway in 1998, Oldham had already become an accomplished fashion photographer, designed the Hotel in Miami Beach and begun work on the Sultan’s Palace in Las Vegas. In the summer of 2002, Target began selling dorm room essentials that he designed.
After creating a recliner with La-Z-Boy for a charity auction in 2002, Oldham, impressed by the company’s technical capabilities and conscientious recycling, worked with them on a collection that has just arrived in La-Z-Boy galleries across the country.
The line is ambitious, incorporating upholstered sofas and chairs available in nearly 200 fabrics, wooden tables and entertainment units, benches that double as toy boxes for kids and media storage for adults, polka-dot and geometric rugs, wooden lamps, aluminum trays, ceramics, candles and glass vases.
And, of course, a recliner. The Arc chair is Oldham’s version of La-Z-Boy’s Joe Six-Pack lounger. “There’s nothing wrong with that perception,” he says of the company’s iconic product. “They have brought a lot of joy and comfort to people, like a favorite pair of shoes.”
La-Z-Boy is not broken, says Oldham. “I’m just here to do a new point of view.” With a trim profile -- “almost like it’s standing on its tiptoes” -- and an ergonomic reclining mechanism replacing the usual exposed handle on the side of the chair, the Arc has lived up to expectation. It is the first La-Z-Boy product to land on the cover of the product design magazine I.D.
Considering himself a textile designer first and foremost, Oldham concedes that the animal prints, candy-shop stripes and “Hollywood rec room” patchwork patterns might make his furniture a “personality amplifier like clothing is.” But he is quick to add that “function absolutely comes first.”
To provide options for urban dwellers who “literally can’t fit furniture through the door,” Oldham created the Snap seating system. Made up of six cushions and four removable polished metal braces, the piece can be reconfigured from a box sofa to an armless, backless twin daybed, with every variation in between. In Los Angeles, the model is already a top seller in the line.
“We are a very practical design house,” Oldham says of his seven-person team, “and at the other side of the room, we’re wack jobs. It’s fun to sit in the middle there and see what we can come up with.” One thing is certain. Though he collects midcentury designs produced by Knoll and Herman Miller, with a particular case of hero worship for the work of fabric designer Alexander Girard, Oldham says, “We don’t need to make another George Nelson coffee table.”
Oldham is also aware of the crumbs between the cushions that today’s home decorators have to endure. “Shopping for furniture is a lot like shopping for cars,” he says. “It is rarely a joyous experience.” Recognizing that most people furnish their homes over time, Oldham says, “I wanted to make sure we designed pieces that would look good no matter when they bought them or where they ended up.”
As much a populist as he is a pop artist, Oldham owes his design sensibilities to a peripatetic childhood. His father “was an early computer whiz, and we moved a lot, from little places all over Texas and California to a marble house in Iran.” The latter strongly affected his style. “I remember having epiphanies, seeing the colors of the spices in the bazaar, and I still have a keen desire for baroque,” he says. “Crazy-fancy is really appealing to me.”
Back in the States, the Oldhams “were always repainting furniture, sawing off legs, adding arms.” Consequently, he says, “I am one of those rare New Yorkers who can actually install a dimmer switch.”
Not that he’d have the time. Oldham, who divides his days between a New York apartment and a house in Pennsylvania -- both decorated in matching stripes “so I don’t have any disruptions or adjustment time” -- is also writing “Homemade Modern,” a how-to primer on midcentury aesthetics.
Last month, Oldham launched his second La-Z-Boy collection. It includes 100 new accessories in porcelain, resin, metal and straw with a “more organic, ethnic feeling.” There are also “occasional tables,” he says chuckling, “as opposed to constant tables,” a sleeper sofa, and an ottoman faceted like a huge jewel made from “fabric that feels like a ski suit, dry and silky at the same time.”
Everything he designs has to measure up to one practical yardstick: “I realize that somebody is going to spill a mustard sandwich on the sofa,” Oldham says. “So you should be able to wipe it right off and not have your day fettered in the slightest.”
