Product Details
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Product Details
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Product Details
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Family rooms are often the catch-all for the home. They serve as a spot for watching television, offer corners for curling up with a good book, and house all the games and toys with which the kids run amok. Due to this overwhelming versatility, family rooms have a slight edge over the former No. 1 family space: the kitchen.
The ideal family room is one that is designed so that it can change purpose effortlessly. In one instance it hosts family game night, and in the next it is a inviting spot for conversing with guests.
Form and function go hand-in-hand to help homeowners realize their dream family rooms. To begin, comfort is a major factor in design and décor. At the heart of most family rooms is a welcoming sofa that can seat a houseful. That's why many homeowners are turning to sectionals that can accommodate one - or a crowd - comfortably.
Next up in family-room composition is a pleasing color palette that features no muss, no fuss fabrics at the core. Warm, rich earth tones are popular in family rooms, perhaps because they evoke a feeling of comfort and security. Deep reds, browns and greens are favorite hues, intermingled with accenting patterns on area rugs or throw pillows. Fabrics used in family rooms should be able to withstand active use. This is why stain-resistant options are a first choice for homeowners. Microfiber, chenille and even leather upholstery wears well and can hold up under spills or children's sticky fingers. Darker colors on fabrics will be more forgiving in this widely used room, camouflaging any errant stains that should occur.
In addition to durable fabrics, homeowners should realize that family rooms need to be furnished with pieces that can serve double-duty in the room. Ottomans make a comfortable footrest but can also be used as coffee tables when entertaining. Avoid open shelving for storage. Rather, choose cabinets and furniture items that can seal away toys, books, electronics and other "eyesores" when the occasion dictates. Look for other items with hidden space, such as benches that have a hinged seat, hiding storage. Sofas with a bed built in can transform the family room into yet another space: a guest room for out-of-town visitors.
Practicality is at the heart of family room design. With all the right elements, this may be a spot every homeowner hates to leave.
An armchair made of rope by Dutch designer Marcel Wanders sells for about $3,000 at design stores such as Unica Home in Las Vegas -- unless you want it in red. For that, you could pay $14,000 or more at Sotheby's. Cappellini, the company that manufactures Mr. Wanders's "Knotted Chair," produced a limited edition of 99 of the chairs in red last year. Now those chairs are collectors' items, selling at auction for more than four times their original price.
While mid-20th-century furniture continues to command huge sums, now much younger designs -- some just a few years old -- are increasingly seeing hefty premiums when resold at auction. Four steel "Tom Vac" chairs by designer Ron Arad sold for $19,200 at a Sotheby's auction in June; in 1997, when they were originally produced in a limited edition of 500, they sold for about $1,000 each. A "Lit Clos" bed from a 2002 edition of eight by designers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec sold at Phillips de Pury last summer for $96,000, about double its original price. This spring, a 1987 Marc Newson cabinet sold for $1.05 million at Christie's, setting a record for a price paid for a work by a living designer.
The soaring prices are partly an outgrowth of the boom in contemporary art. But they also reflect the growing importance of limited editions in the furniture market. Increasingly, furniture designers and manufacturers are borrowing a strategy that has proved successful in collectors' markets from sneakers to watches -- producing small runs of furniture designs in order to create rare, collectible versions of widely owned objects. Now, art-market insiders say some collectors are buying new furniture pieces with an eye toward flipping them on the auction market in a year or two.
"The logic is that you hold it, say, for two years, before going to auction to see a giant increase," says Franklin Getchell, president of design retailer Moss.
That means a commitment to stashing away new furniture in storage or resisting the temptation to sit on it too often. For furniture to resell at auction, it needs to be in pristine condition.
Buying a piece of furniture that's likely to quickly appreciate can require some legwork and, in some cases, connections. Often, there's a waiting list for a limited-edition line by a major designer before the pieces hit stores. And some pieces aren't sold in stores at all, but directly through the designer's studio or the manufacturer, or at an art gallery or furniture fair.
To find out about a limited edition early enough to have a chance of buying one, serious collectors rely on dealers and gallery owners to clue them in. Word of upcoming limited editions also spreads on design blogs and Web sites and in design magazines. Because prices often rise as the edition gets sold, it's important to buy as early as possible. The buyer of No. 90 in a limited edition of 100 is likely to pay more than the buyer of No. 8.
In the case of an unusual line of chairs made out of stuffed animals, the designers recently created a limited edition -- and dramatically affected prices -- by deciding they would stop making the model after they got to the 150th chair. In 2003, Moss began selling the chair, made by the Brazilian design team of Fernando and Humberto Campana, for about $7,500. About six months ago, the Campana brothers decided to cap off the edition.
The 22nd chair in the series, which was bought at Moss for $7,500, was resold at Sotheby's in June for $28,800. Meanwhile, as more of the edition has sold, Moss has raised prices on the chair, which has become increasingly rare. Now the store has one chair left in stock, No. 139 in the series. The store price: $50,000.
Bill Stewart, an interior designer based in Atlanta, has become an avid collector of contemporary furniture. In June, he sold a piece at Sotheby's that he bought a year and half ago at a design fair in Miami. When he bought the piece, a 2004 limited edition "assemblage," or arrangement of furniture, by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec, he paid $40,000. He sold it at Sotheby's for $60,000.
At the same auction, Mr. Stewart sold off a number of contemporary design items, including the Campana brothers' chair, all of which he says he purchased over the past 10 or 15 years for a total of about $325,000. When he bought some of the pieces, friends at the time mocked them as "dust magnets," he recalls. His net from the auction: about $1.2 million, he says.
Experts say the rise of limited editions on the furniture market began after prototypes of mass-produced designs by designers such as Mr. Newson and Tom Dixon emerged as strong sellers at auction about six years ago. Collectors saw them as a way to own a rare, original version of an item that hundreds of thousands of others had purchased on the mass market, and proved willing to pay several times the price of the manufactured versions for a designer's original. In recent years, limited editions have begun hitting the auction market as well, fetching similarly high prices.
Now, manufacturers and galleries are increasingly commissioning limited-edition works from star designers in order to create new collectibles. In June, Swiss furniture company Vitra released a new high-end collection of experimental pieces by major designers such as Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid. Prices range from $7,000 to $190,000 for the works, which come in editions of six to 24. This fall, the Friedman Benda Gallery will release a marble bench with steel-colored legs by Marcel Wanders in a limited edition of 20 pieces, priced around $40,000 each.
But because these new limited editions are being released at increasingly high prices -- Richard Wright, owner of Chicago's Wright auction house, says dealers and designers have "really ratcheted up the price points" in the past year alone -- profit margins at auction are likely to get smaller.
For affordable designs that are likely to appreciate, James Zemaitis, an expert on design at Sotheby's, suggests 1980s British furniture design -- an undervalued market with a strong presence in museums -- as a good place to start buying.
Mr. Stewart says he thinks designers Jasper Morrison and Maria Pergay are good values now. He also is interested in early Philippe Starck furniture, which was never produced in large quantities owing to its eccentric aesthetic.
"It's very 'Star Trek'-y and very 1980s, but it really speaks of the time in which it was created," he says. He just purchased a bench by Mr. Starck for $2,800 from Center44 in New York.
This enabled Woodmark to offer reductions in price and delivery leadtime as well promote local
Australian production.
Over the past 10 years Woodmark has also focused more and more on Australian designed furniture.
In Australia Woodmark is unique in the way they undertake the manufacture of designed pieces. Woodmark contracts a freelance designer, and work with them to develop and prototype their work.
Woodmark is a Quality Assured company to AS/NZS 9002.94 and adheres to the strict standards of its licensors and its products are available at Hunter Valley Design .
Designing Family Space
Space is even more of a premium when families grow. In the last three or four years, Huntington has seen more clients electing to stay in New York to raise families – opting to buy and renovate adjacent apartments instead of fleeing to the suburbs. As people come to view every room in their home as a sanctuary, scrupulous attention is being paid to kitchens and bathrooms – which often copy the atmosphere of a spa. Designers are routinely being asked to knock down walls to recapture space from hallways and closets, which is then integrated into the whole.
The minimalist approach is part of a growing less is more movement among young apartment dwellers.
Young people “really want to have less things,” said Nancy Gesimondo, a designer and professor at the School of Visual Arts, who’s unsure whether it’s a reaction against the clutter that amasses in small apartments or a result of nomadic people in their twenties and thirties wanting to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice. “I think people want to sort of live light.”
Knowledgeable Clients
In some cities, interior decorators do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to designing for clients. But New York designers say their clients – who tend to enter a business relationship armed with knowledge after perusing shelter magazines, trolling the Internet and grilling their friends – are remarkably conversant in breaking design news.
“In New York, everyone knows what’s right and wrong and they’re concerned about it being very this and very that,” said Ed Lobrano, whose firm also has offices in San Francisco, where clients are more laidback.
But the forces that govern trends are often inscrutable, and a well-informed clientele doesn’t necessarily stop fashions that may be repented of in hindsight from becoming huge. Veteran designer Gerald Tolomeo, for one, is relieved that the “stuffed shirt mentality” that ruled in the last decade has dwindled into insignificance.
“In the 1990s, there was chintz and chintz and chintz and chintz,” he said. “You could die from it.”
There’s no absolute agreement on the prevailing trend of today, though most designers concur that a deeper color palette is en vogue. Huntington has noticed a more widespread use of eco-friendly materials and fabrics. Lobrano has spotted darker finishes, bamboo flooring and even a retro inclination toward linoleum flooring in kitchens – once the height of unfashionable. Tolomeo sees greater eclecticism in the selection of décor.
Blurring Tradition
Another trend is the mixing of traditional design and modernism. It’s become commonplace for French Louis XVI pieces to be juxtaposed with mid-century and contemporary furniture, for example.
But traditional and modern aren’t ideas that are always understood by laymen. Many designers say they have to decipher what their clients want.
“My clients that are basically traditional clients – they say they want modern, but they don’t really want modern,” said Lobrano, who adds flourishes like contemporary coffee tables and wall coverings for clients he senses are plunging too recklessly into modernism.Designers have to know what a space requires, said Jennifer Logun, a designer and professor at the Pratt Institute. Nineteenth century furniture in a Tribeca loft might seem incoherent, and, in the same vein, an ultra-modern interior would be jarring in a pre-war apartment with intricate moldings and trim overlooking Central Park.
“To go in and put in a very modern sleek design, for me, it doesn’t quite fit,” said Logun, of the archetypal Upper East Side apartment. “It’s important to respect the context of the space itself.”
From Lauren Russell and her husband Kevin's Severna Park garage three years ago, the couple has grown a multimillion-dollar custom cottage-style furniture firm, Russell and Mackenna, with 30 dealers up and down the East Coast.
This summer the factory doubled its space by moving to a 6,000-square-foot production facility in Jessup, and the Russells opened their first showroom in Severna Park, which is already outselling the other licensed dealers.
The burgeoning furniture empire was born of vanity. Or at least one vanity.
The Russells needed the bathroom fixture when they renovated their home, so Mr. Russell set off for the garage with a handful of power tools. A neighbor was so impressed by the craftsmanship that she ordered 30 pieces for her home, essentially seeding the company.
Orders really started rolling in when the couple's work was featured in Coastal Living magazine in March 2005.
"The phone started ringing off the hook," Mrs. Russell said.
That's when they decided to make a full-time go of the business. Mr. Russell had left his job at T. Rowe Price, coincidentally just ahead of a round of layoffs in his section.
"I got out at a great time," he said.
Though his father was a woodworker, Mr. Russell said he didn't take up the hobby until he and his wife renovated their home. It was then that he learned to carve decorative designs by trial and error.
Combing his new interest in woodworking with Mrs. Russell's background in art and graphic design, the company settled on an aesthetic marked by clean lines and a palette of soothing pastels that mix and match well with each other. Mrs. Russell recruited her father, Larry Strassner, to manage the company's books.
Though they didn't know it at the time, their success bucked the national trend.
While hundreds of furniture companies gathered in Las Vegas last week to bemoan the decline in domestic production, Anne Arundel County has become a haven for boutique dealers who have weathered the market's slide.
Furniture builders say they have trouble competing with cheaper products imported from overseas. The slowing housing market has also moderated demand for new furniture.
But Russell and Mackenna and the Pine Away furniture store in Annapolis both say they've identified their niches.
"There's that segment of people that wants nice hardwood furniture and doesn't want junk," said Lori Livingston, who owns Pine Away with her sister, Terri Livingston Kozel.
The sisters sell custom-made furniture that's handcrafted at their plant in Jacksonville, Fla., where labor is cheaper.
Boutique shops that appeal to high-end consumers typically have a better chance of surviving market dips, said Kathy Floam, president of the Pomerantz Agency, an Annapolis marketing firm.
"They're offering something that's better quality ...," she said. "There's a whole lot of people who don't think cheaper is better."
For its next venture, moving into upholstered furniture, Russell and Mackenna is looking south to High Point, N.C., America's furniture capital. It's also the home of the American Home Furnishings Alliance, a furniture trade group.
On Oct. 1 Russell and Mackenna will launch its line of upholstered furniture, in design for more than a year.
The company's 12 employees can turn out 150 pieces of custom handcrafted furniture a month. Despite moving the business in July, the company took four times as many orders as in that same month last year, and expects to hit $5 million in annual sales within three years.
All of that because Lauren Russell couldn't afford the vanity of her choice.
"I just wanted great furniture, and the only company that got me jazzed, I couldn't afford," she said. "So I figured out a way to build it myself."
Decor Classics now has plenty of stock of its popular settings including:
The Sadina range has proved to be popular with Décor Classics clientele, mainly due to the strength of the double pole arms of the lounge settings and the clean-cut lines in the overall design.
The Rachelle range is also much in demand as the design is stylish and sophisticated, featuring twisted manau cane in a truly unique design and as aesthetically attractive from the back of the setting to the front view of the setting.
Décor Classics has also ensured that this shipment has included plenty of the double papasans (namely mamasans) and the single papasans which are also made using manau cane, and which are much sought after throughout Australia due to the resurgence of this setting in casual living areas.
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