Furniture Makers Go Modern but Remain Web-Shy

HIGH POINT, N.C. —  These should be euphoric times for the furniture industry. The economy is good. Sales are soaring. And fashion cachet is no longer just some mindless hype attached to every new sofa skirt and chair arm. In fact, things look so robust that the International Home Furnishings Market here, the largest furniture fair in the world, plans to add a 17-story, $45 million showroom to a city that already explodes with more than 8 million square feet of display space. So why is everyone acting as if someone ran off with the last yard of tone-on-tone beige chenille?

In a word: e-tailing. At a moment when every other industry is caught up in Internet fever, furniture manufacturers and, in turn, consumers are stuck in the cross-fire between click and brick. On one side, there’s the burgeoning crop of furniture e-tailers--Furniture.com (https://www.furniture.com), FurnitureFind.com (https://www.furniturefind.com) and GoodHome.com (https://www.goodhome.com) among them--that are angling to market everything from desks to dining rooms on the Web. On the other side are traditional storefront sellers who are so edgy about the prospect of a retail sea change that many have flat-out warned big-name manufacturers that it’s us or them. “I’d love to jump into e-commerce,” Tom Richards, director of advertising for Hickory Chair, said during a tour of his showroom. “But we’ve had dealers who’ve indicated that they’d slit our throats if we do. They’ve smiled when they said it, but they’re nervous.”

So nervous that, as 2,300 furniture and accessory manufacturers debuted their new collections last week at the semiannual market here, selling, not styling, created the strongest buzz. As many as 50 e-tailers were in town, hoping to snare the attention and collections of top manufacturers, who have so far left them to sell mostly private-label goods. Even the opening-day press seminar, which normally focuses on the latest in pillows and sofa legs, zoomed in on the ferocity of the e-wars. Though e-commerce accounts for barely 3% of the sales and none of the profits in the $60-billion-a-year furniture industry, its long-term potential is what has people sounding like characters from a bad mob movie. “These [e-tailers] are reviled, hated, despised by some full-line furniture stores,” said analyst Ivan Saul Cutler, director of furniture industry services at consultant BDO Seidman. “Some are even calling them Dot-Commies.”

Trim, Clean Lines Are Taking Over

Ironically, the furor has spilled into the open just as the furniture industry seems to be catching up with the fast-changing tastes of seen-it-all, want-it-now consumers. As the millennium approaches, the overstuffed, shabby-chic silhouettes that lumbered through the ‘90s are finally gone. In their place are shapes as chic and trim as a pair of Gucci bell-bottoms. “There’s a modern movement going on not just in terms of Modern furniture, but in taking a roll arm or cottagey-looking things and making them newer and cleaner,” said furniture designer Mitchell Gold, who helped unstuff the furniture industry as surely as the Gap loosened up fashion.

Rather than try to be all things to all people, this season’s strongest collections offer a distinct point of view and clear dividing lines: Gray is the color of the moment, but oranges and reds are red-hot too. A loosely defined modernism reigns, but so does a worldly French-English aesthetic. Silhouettes are trimmer than they’ve been in years, unless they’re grand-scale pieces aimed at the ever-grander homes that consumers are demanding.

What ties these disparate threads? “Comfort, comfort, comfort,” said Britt Beemer, senior research director of America’s Research Group. “More Americans are trading in their dining chairs for sofas as their favorite places to eat.”

When it comes to point of view, one of the strongest statements came from Thomas O’Brien, founder of SoHo’s hip Aero Studios and the designer behind such commercial interiors as Giorgio Armani and Waterworks, the upscale bath store. In his debut collection for Hickory Chair, O’Brien turned out the sort of quiet French-Zen pieces that evoke the luxe minimalism of French designer Christian Liaigre. Among the key pieces: a sleek ebony trestle table and an angular sofa cosseted on three sides by low-slung bookcases. But, perhaps to prove he’s no one-note Tommy, O’Brien’s signature piece was a wildly ornate dining chair, lavishly carved with ribbons and braiding and inspired by one he salvaged from a SoHo antiques shop.

Equally sleek but more compact was an inventive collection of leather tables, chairs and screens designed for Mulholland Brothers by Eric Brand, another retail designer, whose installations have included stores for Chanel, Coach and Donna Karan. Here, he worked in rich, satiny hides, topping game tables and desks in leather (and adding a pony express bag to the side for storage) and finishing a coffee table with a shelf made of woven belt straps.

Wide Interpretations of Modern Style

Of course, in the world of mass-market furniture, modern is a relative thing, so it’s not surprising that the newest interpretations run the gamut. There’s classic: To celebrate its 45th anniversary, Thayer Coggin unveiled a limited edition of spare sofas and chairs by Milo Baughman, the company’s first designer and one of the first to become a marquee name. There’s ‘70s: In the age of Cher chic, what could be more fitting than Raymond Waites’ revival of the “playpen” sofa and ottoman for Laneventure? And there’s millennial modern, particularly Larry Laslo’s sleek designs for Directional, in which he covered the simplest sofas and slipper chairs in screaming shades of red. “It’s the one color that is a classic that people are not afraid of,” Laslo said with a satisfied grin.

The antidote to all this paring down is, not surprisingly, dressing up. And this season, that translates into furniture’s Grand Tour. For Anglophiles, Century introduced a 27-piece British Open collection, inspired by the Royal and Ancient Golf Club in Scotland’s St. Andrews--which is to say, the sort of heavy, carved-leg tables and cabinets suited more to swinging a club than partying in one. For Francophiles, Ralph Lauren’s new Ardsley Square collection for Henredon is cut with ribbed edges and finished in highly polished mahogany to give it a Deco air. Even futurist Faith Popcorn gets into the act. The signature piece of her debut collection of office furniture at Hooker is a half-moon desk with open grillwork that she found on an inspiration trip to France.

Still, furniture does not sell on style alone. And if anyone needs confirmation of how broadly defined celebrity has become, one need only look at the names behind this season’s designer launches. First up was model Kathy Ireland, whose debut at Vanguard offered nearly as many cliches as chairs. Casting herself as a working mom, Ireland said she wanted her pieces to be “about solutions,” that she wanted to “take the fear out of furniture,” and to “make it safe for people to take risks.” As for the furniture, Ireland, who also has a Kmart clothing line, said her inspirations for the 160-piece collection included the East Coast, the West Coast and England. “When I was a child, we took a family trip to England, and I was awe-inspired by Windsor Castle,” she said. “Although it was large, it had a warm feeling.” But just to be sure she got the details right, she got some input from Britain’s Prince Edward.

Furniture Fit for a Forbes

Over at Harden Furniture, the Forbes family didn’t need any princely advice. After all, this is the clan--Chris (Forbes vice chairman), Steve (U.S. presidential candidate), Timothy (Forbes chief executive) and Robert (Forbes vice president)--whose holdings include Old Battersea House in London, Chateau de Balleroy in Normandy, Trinchera Ranch in Colorado and a 151-foot yacht, the Highlander, not to mention a stash of fab Faberge eggs. All of it translated into a surprisingly user-friendly array of furniture, from richly carved armoires with faux reptile trim to chairs covered in pastel-egg tapestries to an homage to Malcolm Forbes that mixed a silver Harley with a black leather sofa. And to get it off the ground: two brilliantly colored hot-air balloons that flew above the marketplace here. And for nervous e-tailers, a balloon or two could be exactly what the retail doctor ordered. As analyst Cutler put it, “consumers are still ordering furniture online and rushing out to see if it parachutes down to the ground.”

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High Point

Highlights

* Shape: Sofas and chairs are slimmer than ever and eager to show some leg.

* Scale: Modernists downsize upholstered and wood pieces. But for all those post-postmodern mini-mansions with 20-foot ceilings and grand palladian windows, think massive and muscular. Case in point: the Insignia collection from Drexel Heritage, whose four-poster bed features fortress-like columns.

* Color: Gray is the color of the millennium, but for adventure, designers go for tone-on-tone taupes, champagnes and ice blues. Taking a fashion cue, red is red-hot. Then there are the iconoclasts, like Larry Laslo, whose idea of heaven is a gray Directional collection in an Hermes-orange room.

* Fabric: Chenille hasn’t crested yet. But the real news is billiard cloth, a soft, smooth wool that tailors to a clean, smart finish.

* Details: Think feminine and fun. At American Leather, Jenna Hall’s eyelet pillows were inspired by Furla’s cutout handbags. At Henredon, Ralph Lauren’s Ardsley Square collection was finished off with Gwyneth Paltrow-pink Angora shams trimmed with pearly buttons. At Mitchell Gold, there’s a Catmandog ottoman, which doubles as a nifty dog bed.