By DAVID SOKOL
The New American Minimalism
IT'S A PHENOMENON AS OLD as America itself—our taste in furniture, as in fashion, is fickle. In the early 19th century, the winged pedestals of English Regency were brushed aside for the sleeker lines of Grecian Plain. Our suburban forefathers moved Danish modern into the attic and trucked in lumbering Spanish revival. And today we're putting our playful blob lamps on eBay and returning to simple, locally made pieces.
Call it the New American Minimalism. It usurps our 2000s-era romance with confections perhaps best represented by the Dutch brand Moooi, which conjured up crocheted side tables and Louis-style chairs burned to a slight crisp. It also bears little resemblance to older minimalist vocabularies, like the colorful Memphis style that was parodied in the 1988 movie "Beetlejuice." Instead, honesty is now the policy: reserved shapes, natural materials, apparent construction and hand finishing.
Consider the Maxhedron chandelier by Bec Brittain, a prism of one-way mirrors mounted into a steel armature. Or maybe the Wave Bench by Seattle's Henrybuilt Furniture, with gentle curves and the occasional game board routed into a wood slab that also boasts visible mortise-and-tenon joinery. Such thoughtfully detailed forms "encourage the consumer to care for the people making it for them," said designer Lindsey Adelman, who is based in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Ms. Adelman (who employed Ms. Brittain until last year) is known for chandeliers with handblown glass volumes projecting from spare, branchlike arms, as well as her You Make It series of DIY light fixtures built from off-the-shelf parts. "I'm constantly searching for an economy of means, which is probably how most industrial designers think," she said. "And because the form itself is minimal, the edges have to be perfect."
As she has become more successful, Ms. Adelman has delved deeper into the minimal-artisanal approach. At the Salone del Mobile furniture fair in Milan this week, she introduced 25 candlesticks designed with flakes of cast brass sparingly affixed to sleek, barely tapered cylinders lathe-turned from walnut wood.
Scott Fellows and Craig Bassam, owners of New Canaan, Conn.–based furniture studio BassamFellows, also are faces of the movement. After two years in business in Switzerland, the partners moved back to the United States and brought their manufacturing with them for convenience. The company ultimately settled on carpentry and upholstery workshops in Lancaster County, Pa., which happened to be located near reserves of hardwood. All that proximity meant less travel for the designers. The local origins also helped convince retailer Design Within Reach to begin selling the duo's sophisticated yet highly tactile ash and walnut Tractor Stools a year and a half ago.
Independent studios and big companies alike are dialing up their made-in-America credentials. Since the mid-2000s, Minneapolis-based Room & Board has sourced approximately 90% of its inventory domestically. As of this year, all its wood collections are made in the U.S. A series of wood-banded pieces called Moro, previously imported from China, is now made in Vermont by longtime company supplier Lyndon Woodworking.
One reason behind the American manufacturing boom is improved production conditions domestically—or at least more difficulty elsewhere. Tyler Hays is the founder of the upscale brand BDDW, whose Philadelphia woodworkers and metalsmiths pair muscular wood elements with wabi-sabi bronze pedestals and casework. He said that falling wages in post-recession America have become competitive with increasingly pricey Chinese labor, and that "you can spend $4 in fossil fuel for shipping a $10 item overseas."
“The basic yet refined lines allow more whimsical furniture pieces to stand out.”
Rich Brilliant Willing sells home furnishings it designs to match the capabilities of local fabricators. Its Delta lighting collection, for instance, is produced by a lamp-shade facility in New Jersey. The New York–based company, whose work has an improvised quality, also licenses its designs to manufacturers with overseas operations, but co-founder Charles Brill described this as a series of missed opportunities. Refinements get lost in translation, more quality controls are required, and time zones and transport schedules delay prototyping and production.
Overall, domestic costs have come down enough for BDDW's Mr. Hays to create more affordable furniture and home accessories, such as collapsible bookshelves and wood cutting boards for the wholesale company Lostine. "We're making a bigger profit on pieces made in America than stuff made in China, and there's huge, huge interest at the Anthropologie price point," he said. The flash-sale website Fab.com also demonstrates the booming demand in this market segment. As of deadline, the online retailer was running sales of garden tools created by a Montana blacksmith and forged-steel lighting made in Illinois that the site described as having an "unpretentious, minimalist sensibility with a rough-hewn edge."
David McFadden, chief curator of the Museum of Art and Design in New York, thinks such simplicity and sturdiness is "a lingering response to the economics of the past few years." Los Angeles–based interior designer Ruth Storc, who writes the blog Design Patriot with her graphic-designer husband, Michael, agreed that the New American Minimalism captures a moment when conspicuous consumption is largely out of fashion. But she said these designs also embody the desire to support local economies.
"People are interested in all things artisanal, because they want to know where the things they live with are being made and by whom," she said. "Perhaps there is a bit of a backlash against globalization and technology."
Fab.com co-founder and chief creative officer Bradford Shane Shellhammer, a direct beneficiary of that modern technology, predicts the movement will last: "It's hard to check responsible consumption at the door and go back to mass-produced things that have no stories to be told."
Responsibility simply looks good, too. Kimberly Ayres, the San Francisco designer whose sunshiny interiors might seem at odds with the pared lines and visible mechanics of the new minimalism, embraces these furnishings precisely for their counterpoint quality. "The basic yet refined lines allow more whimsical furniture pieces to stand out" while, she said, "the handmade quality is grounding."
The versatility of minimal artisanship is what drove the recent partnership between Chicago carpet-tile company FLOR and Atlas Industries. The small Brooklyn manufacturer is perhaps best known for a modular wall-mounted storage system that, according to Atlas co-founder Thomas Wright, resists the economies of mass production. Atlas is furnishing a new chain of retail stores for the DIY flooring firm. Wright's partner, Joseph Fratesi, said that the functionality and character of their work gives customers "a different experience of the built world."
Jerry Helling, president of Lenoir, N.C.-based contract furnishings giant Bernhardt Design—which is hosting a temporary gallery show entitled "America Made Me" during the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York next month—concurs that American furniture design lately has embraced simplicity, craft and sustainability. He also notes that a planned-obsolescence attitude still pervades the American furniture industry, so we may soon see more ornate furniture again. Mr. Hays, of BDDW and Lostine, argues that American-made furniture is here to stay, no matter what stripe or style. "It's green and good for the economy," he said. "Local fits everybody's agenda."