Designers show off lines at Hamptons’show houses
July 19th, 2007 Category FurnitureEveryone from top designers to top models has found success with namesake furniture lines (even Donald Trump lent his name to a new collection). Now, increasing numbers of designers want to get into the action, using show houses to showcase their work.
At the Hampton Designer Showhouse, which opens for tours Sunday, and the 2007 Hamptons Cottages & Gardens Idea House, which opened last week, the designers sprinkled their rooms with pieces from, or intended for, their own product lines.
At the Idea House in Amagansett, Nancy Corzine’s Hollywood-chic media room was awash in neutral fabrics and furniture from the designer’s own collection. “It’s hard to do a room in the basement. You want it to be light and comfortable,” says Corzine, who has showrooms in Manhattan and Los Angeles. So the designer upholstered the walls in her signature line of Ultrasuede fabric and selected a cozy-looking linen velvet couch.
Southampton designer Brian Brady designed an eco-friendly living room filled with natural fabric furniture, bamboo and concrete accessories. “It’s a typical Hamptons living room - sophisticated and casual,” he says. Much of the decor - including white linen-and-cotton sofas and chairs topped with denim-blue and orange pillows, as well as oversize concrete dice used as bookends - is either designed by Brady or available at his Southampton showroom.
Designers say that furniture design is an outgrowth of what they already do: custom pieces for clients when they can’t find what they want in the marketplace. It’s a way to distinguish themselves from the increasingly design-oriented mass market home furnishing stores like Crate & Barrel and Pottery Barn. While designers traditionally provide a labor-intensive service, a furniture or fabric line offers the prospect of a moneymaking business venture.
Designing a brand
“It’s a supplemental source of income, and it helps to establish a brand identity, branding your name and style,” says Greg Lanza of Glen Cove, who expects to launch his own furniture collection, Trueform, in the spring. Lanza decorated the master suite bathroom at the Hampton Designer Showhouse in Bridgehampton, and says show houses inspire new pieces.
Someone already has asked him to re-create this show house’s folding privacy screen - placed between the tub and the window - as a headboard. “When things get a good reaction - and this has gotten a good reaction - that’s how you form your line,” says Lanza. “I like to incorporate one new prototype for each show.”
Manhattan designer Rona Landman, who also did a room at the Hampton show house, says she feels the same way. “I’ve had a few pieces for two years, but now I want to put a full line together,” she says. “I’d be interested in any type of marketing as long as there’s integrity in the product and it’s something I’d do anyway.”
For her Deco-inspired study at the show house, she included her own bar unit with leather door panel inserts. She flanked a Deco-style sofa with her own bookshelves, which project out toward the bottom to function like a side table.
Custom pieces
For Manhattan architect and designer Stephen Miller Siegel, it was logical to reproduce and sell some of his custom pieces done for clients, since the prototyping work was done. His line of furniture and lighting is mostly derivative of classic styles, which he “tweaks” and reproduces, he says, adding, “It doesn’t really pay the rent. I wish it would.”
He used one of his X-benches and his platform bed in straw marquetry for his Designer Showhouse bedroom, a sophisticated composition in dark blue, greens and browns that features a $575,000 Jacque-Emile Ruhlmann vanity from 1928 and a nod to Hamptons nature with grasspaper wallcovering and a design of corn stalks on a fabric-covered folding screen. “I can’t get enough corn when I’m out there,” he says.
Designer Richard Livingston for Period in Manhattan says that, as mass marketers adopt more designer concepts, designers are forced to create unusual products to distinguish themselves. “You need to make a mark between you and other designers and mass marketers,” he says. “We go out of our way to do unique pieces for clients.”
His nature-inspired dining room at the show house has wallpaper created from a 360-degree panoramic photo taken in East Hampton woods, a chandelier of tree roots and tear drop crystals, and a large circular dining table and base made of Corian that will be his first furniture introduction. The second will be the room’s white sideboard with mother-of-pearl tile door panels from Bali, lucite legs and a glass top.
Designers with established furniture lines also are represented at the Hampton Designer Showhouse: Zoya Bograd’s Manhattan-based company, Bograd Kids, with flouncy traditional upholstered chairs and white four-poster bed, created a girl’s room in an upstairs bedroom, while Comerford Hennessy, a design team with a store in Bridgehampton featuring much of their own furniture, put together a contemporary office on the lower level, mixing vintage chairs with a custom wood desk and new bookcases that will soon join their line.
At least one designer didn’t use any of her namesake furniture line, already marketed for four years by a major company. Manhattan designer Celerie Kemble’s designs for Laneventure are far too reasonably priced to be invited into the stratospheric realms of the designer show house (although she did use two faux leathers from her fabric line for Valtekz, on an ottoman and on a bookshelf). Instead, she was asked by Brunschwig & Fils to use new introductions from its high-end fabric and furniture lines in her luxurious living room.
Her room stood in contrast to the adjoining living room by Peter Lentz of Manhattan, which is everything you’d expect in a beach house: light, white and airy, with touches of blue and metallic silver and throw pillows round as balls.
Kemble’s room paid homage to the Hamptons sun, sand and sky in its colors, she says, but is not “beachhouse-specific.”
Its olive green velvet wing chairs and chenille sofa slipcover, its buttery yellows and blue-grays (like the mist that rolls in on the Hamptons beaches, she says) were meant to evoke the comfort and warmth of a home living room rather than what she considers the transient feel of a beach house.
“I think a home in the Hamptons is more than a summer home,” she says. “I think fall is the prettiest time.”
Arlene Travis, who, as co-owner of Mansions & Millionaires, has overseen dozens of Long Island show houses during the past 38 years, says product lines have increasingly taken precedence in design schemes over elaborate wall finishes, ceiling treatments and moldings. “If it’s not their own, they’re using something they’ve adapted,” says Travis. “The products are becoming much more important.”
