The Pottery Barn Revolution
In the
ritual bashing of wildly successful retail outlets, Pottery Barn has received
its share of scorn. In-the-know consumers mock the home furnishing chain for
its buy-a-lamp, get-a-lifestyle attitude and its antiqued, weathered,
color-coordinated pseudostyle. The omnipresent store has also been accused of
inducing a bland homogenization in home design. "Everything seems more and more
the same, wherever you are," wrote architecture critic Paul Goldberger in a
New York Times Magazine article last year. "The stuff may be good but it
ain't special."
Goldberger, while
rejoicing that sophisticated design has finally reached the American masses,
rightly lamented that it has come at the price of individual variation and
taste. Just as the Gap look has become as much of a uniform now as the preppy
aesthetic it replaced, so also has the Pottery Barn look standardized our homes
as vacuously as any traditional style. But in the big picture, the Gapping of
American furniture has actually been one of the most welcome developments in
recent years. It has made good design easily accessible and, paradoxically,
opened opportunities for American manufacturing that may help consumers develop
a sense of personal style.
Americans have always had bad taste in furniture. It's been
hard to say, though, whether we're innately philistine in our artistic
judgments or have merely been deprived of decent choices. Until the 1930s, most
furniture that was well designed came from Europe, was priced accordingly, and
was off-limits to most consumers. Then things started to change, slowly. The
Bauhaus design school introduced the idea that good design could be had by
anyone; in the 1950s the Bauhaus aesthetic led to the American manufacture of
such modernist (but still too pricey) classics as Charles Eames' lounge chair
and ottoman and Arne Jacobsen's Egg Chair. In the '60s, an Englishman named
Terence Conran opened a store in London called Habitat, selling what has come
to be called "transitional" furniture--mixable pieces so neutral and
inoffensive they could fit into any environment. Conran brought the idea to the
United States in 1977, opening his chain. Still, big manufacturers such as
Ethan Allen, Broyhill, and Drexel continued to dominate the market with safe,
conservative styles or traditional looks from the last century.
What finally ended the
reign of the big manufacturers was the proliferation of such
high-design/low-price stores as Pottery Barn, Crate & Barrel, and IKEA. In
the last decade, Pottery Barn, et al., have realized the ideas of the Bauhaus
and Conran, and then some. Furniture has been Gapped--streamlined to its purest
lines in a way that appeals both to people with sophisticated tastes and to
those without a lot of money. And while this standardization has produced a
certain monotony, it has also generated some good design. Many a dish or chair
at IKEA or Pottery Barn is of better design quality--with simpler forms and
purer colors--than its counterpart at Bloomingdale's (although the
manufacturing quality may be not as good). Take, for example, Pottery Barn's
wide-brimmed Capri bowls, which come in bone or light periwinkle. Resembling,
yet not flatly derivative of, an Asian rice dish, a Capri bowl confidently
walks that fine line between elegance and edge--and was on sale last weekend
for $4.99.
Pottery Barn and the others have turned Americans on to
furniture. According to Barnard's Retail Trend Report, since mid-1996,
consumers have been spending more on the home than on apparel ($296.3 billion
vs. $277.9 billion in 1997). This sudden interest can also be attributed to
other causes--we're older and nesting; we're spending more time at home; we're
making bolder purchases because of a better economy. But what's noteworthy is
that it's young people who have developed a taste for cool places to sit and
sleep. A survey by the Home Furnishings Council found that consumers under 35
were most likely to agree with the statement "I like to shop for furniture."
Young buyers are growing up with good design around them--in clothes, in
advertisements, in movie sets--and this improved climate surely makes them more
discriminating shoppers.
Paradoxically, the
Gapping of furniture has made it easier for new, innovative design companies to
thrive. You could see the stirrings of a creative revolution at this year's
International Contemporary Furniture Fair, held a few weeks ago in Manhattan.
The fair still showcased some of the arts-and-craftsy "novelty" elements
(lights in the shape of pigs or brassieres, chairs made from shopping carts or
traffic barricades) that earned it the "bad flea market" label when it began a
decade ago. But there were also a dozen small designer-manufacturers producing
funky yet rational design at affordable prices. Even though these items cost a
bit more than Pottery Barn fare, they were no doubt affected by the success of
that store's clean, simple lines. Blu Dot Design, for instance, offered its
handsome and functional Uptown series: a cocktail table ($499), sideboard
($899), and media cabinet ($649) of cherry, chrome, and sandblasted glass that
discreetly allow for both storage and display. Although the Minneapolis-based
company is just a year old, its three twentysomething founders have already got
orders from more than 100 retailers around the country. They've been written up
in Newsweek, the New York Times, and an array of design magazines. Most telling
of all, the series' cocktail table and sideboard are now part of Chandler and
Joey's living room on Friends.
In addition, medium-size companies such as Directions are
now offering sophisticated design and manufacturing quality at department-store
prices, retaining an attention to fine detail that the mass chains lack. Ralph
Lauren, Calvin Klein, and Donna Karan have also got in on the act, introducing
their high-quality (though far from original) "home collections." Lauren has
already covered a quarter of Bloomingdale's furniture department with haute
preppy ensembles of paisley, tartan plaid, and corduroy. The rise of "boomer
casual" has even forced the major manufacturers to move beyond their perennial
colonial reproductions. Their more "modernized" furniture looks as if it were
designed by a committee tallying up market research, but it's a start.
A home
swathed in Karan, of course, is no better than a home swathed in Pottery Barn.
But the next stage in America's design evolution may not be far off. In New
York, one hip SoHo store, called Troy, offers new stuff next to classics by
Jacobsen and Alvar Aalto. A Tribeca store, Totem, showcases a slew of young
designers who will individualize pieces according to your home and character.
Totem's first line of its own--the Surface Collection by Lloyd Schwan--is both
playful and versatile, consisting of building-blocklike tables, credenzas, and
cabinets with interchangeable parts and colors, depending on whether the pieces
are going in an office or a kid's room. The collection won a Best Furniture
award at this year's International Contemporary Furniture Fair. Soon, Americans
will no longer be able to blame bad taste in furniture on a lack of choice.
