Welcome to Wonderland

“Whimsical� is the adjective applied to Sallie Trout’s innovative furniture and home accessories.

Floppy Poppy flower tables, egg-shaped Fin tables and Eloise storage stools (“Solving the problem of where to put a purse while sitting at the bar�) typify her approach.

“I want to design objects with a sense of humor that are sophisticated enough to last,� she explains. Since founding Trout Studios in 1989, she has built a reputation for witty, form-driven furniture and objects that seem like extensions of her own dynamic personality.

In just the last year, she has launched a dozen new lines, a distinctive mix that reflects her desire “not to be pigeonholed.�

“I tend to move in several different directions simultaneously,� says Trout, a stream-of-consciousness conversationalist who has been driven by a displaced nesting instinct since she was a child building tree forts.

Although she’s best known for innovative designs of tables, beds and home accessories, her major passion, she insists, is space design. “I can walk into an ugly industrial building dripping with toxins and see immediately how it can be made beautiful.�

Trout came to Los Angeles more than 10 years ago hoping to design interiors, but turned to products “because you couldn’t put together a portfolio for space designs.�

Raised in Baltimore, she studied design at architectural firms and the Maryland Art Institute after receiving a bachelor’s degree in international relations and linguistics at Johns Hopkins.

She hoped eventually to do design work in Europe because she likes the attention to design detail and refinement in every aspect of continental life. Her first stop, however, was Los Angeles (“It has to be New York or Los Angeles, in terms of the client base and the press�), where she discovered a huge aerospace industry “crying for new resources and new ways to use knowledge.�

To that end, Trout learned welding at L.A. Trade Tech. “I started doing work at an iron foundry, getting some wild organic shapes that are sculptural. It was like candyland.�

She also took woodworking and furniture design classes at the Southern California Institute of Architecture. She made a steel, wood and glass screen and then sold it. “There was an article written about that, so I started making more pieces,� and she was on her way.

Running Her Own Show From Concept to Sales

Trout first established her name with decorative hardware. When customers started asking for the steel-carved handles off her furniture, enchanted by the playful geometric shapes and spirals, she launched a line of handles and doorknobs and curtain rods, printed a catalog, and wrote $35,000 in sales at a 1992 New York trade show.

Because of a glitch in tooling, all of the orders had to be put on hold, which, she says, “cost me a fortune and my edge in the market and my possibility of eventually becoming a rich old woman.�

Today there are at least 30 other companies making whimsical handles, and Trout is much wiser about production.

Through UCLA Extension, she teaches a course in furniture design, covering everything from concept to marketing.

“I would love to see the next generation of people avoid my mistakes,� she says. “People get into design because it’s a passion, not to make money, but they need to know costing and marketing.�

As part of the course, she insists that the students share the resources they discover. “It seemed important that designers look at each other as a support network, instead of competition, which is too often the case.�

Trout is also unusual in that she runs her own show, from start to finish. Working with a team, she can come up with an idea, think it through, create and market it, all under the roof of her cluttered studio--an open, airy, blue concrete-block industrial building on a Culver City alley.

A rusty 1964 Ford Falcon van serves as the company car for Trout Studios, which she has dubbed the “widget factory.�

“It sounds cacophonous, but is actually fairly cohesive,� Trout says, leading a tour of the operations. Dressed in overalls and a cutoff T-shirt, and trailed by her dogs Elvis and Target, she points out highlights: “Here we’ve got welding, here we’ve got woodworking, here is assembly and UPS mailing.�

Her team includes K.T. Reilly, who will do bookkeeping “under pressure� but chiefly is “our welding chick�; Mark McLaughlin, the “woodworking guy� who also can be pressed into computer service; and Michelle Rickman, who joined the staff recently and does “a little bit of welding, a lot of woodworking, is an adept machinist and finisher, and helps with the boxing and finishing stuff.�

Their upholstery work, which seems minimal, is sent out, Trout adds. “Three women, and nobody sews.�

Maybe she doesn’t sew, but Trout has learned such tricks as making furniture so that it can be shipped flat rather than crated.

She points out the nontoxic finish on a tabletop. The Trout Studios philosophy has an eco-edge, using water-based finishes, saving scrap wood to use for runners and glides, and saving scrap fabric for samples.

Spinning an Idea Into Versatile Uses

This continues at home, Trout adds. She and her husband, Geoff Cline, who is house counsel for environmentally minded Patagonia, Inc., are doing a ground-up remodel of a Santa Monica house. They’re opting for green utilities, non-formaldehyde products wherever possible, energy-efficient appliances and solar heating on a swimming pool.

Right now, she says, the house is a “mustard-colored monstrosity with aluminum awnings and a rabbit warren interior.�

But Trout already envisions an interior of crisp Baltic birch lines, furniture with lathe-turned legs, stainless steel in the kitchen, antiques combined with new objects, a tin roof and doors with “narrow little vertical openings.�

It was while working out designs for the railings and stairwells that she got interested in the form of historical mosque spires--�intricate and whimsical--not a horizontal plane to be found.�

“It gets its own momentum,� Trout says of her thought process. Not only will she use the designs for the house’s sculptured staircase, she also made a line out of it.

The new line, the Form Study Collection, was introduced at New York’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair in May. It includes Baltic birch tables, beds, seating and accessories and a choice of five dynamic leg patterns, including Lulu (a series of graduated disks), Bombadinga (a spear-like taper) and Lola (an egg-and-disk pattern).

“I’m excited about this series,� Trout says. “I think we’ve married sophistication and whimsy without going over the top.�

A stack of the lathe-turned legs in silver waits by the studio’s entrance for an order from the Las Vegas Hilton toy store, which asked for “whimsical and French.�

Big projects this year have included pieces for the offices and stores of such entertainment companies as MTV and Disney. And Trout also does custom pieces for residential customers.

Emily Maupin of Pacific Palisades thought of Sallie Trout when she had looked everywhere for a TV cabinet that wasn’t a big, heavy-looking box.

“I had come across her things buying towel racks and knobs, and loved their style, so I asked her to make a TV cabinet,� Maupin says.

Reflecting the Asian feel of Maupin’s living room, Trout designed a blond birch cabinet with plate aluminum legs and metal trim ,including a wave of crown molding on top and picture frames on the side.

“It’s wonderful--fantastic!� Maupin says. “Perfect for the room, which is open and beachy-feeling.�

Trout’s lines are carried in 15 or so furniture showrooms nationwide, about 250 wholesale kitchen and bath showrooms around the country display her hardware, and she gets lots of catalog requests on her Web site, www.troutstudios.com.

Occasionally, flipping through a shelter magazine, she will spot a Trout design, but otherwise, she says, “we usually don’t know who the end user is.�

She’d love a retail showroom, but not right now. “I can’t be here and there both, and I’ve seen too many people who sort of lost their grounding that way.�

Although furniture is the major business now, Trout doesn’t want to be limited to that. “I still want to design spaces, I want to build sculptural objects and make little fine-art pieces and do space planning and keep doing furniture. It’s all in the same sort of visual vein.�

Connie Koenenn may be reached by e-mail at [email protected].