Is There a D/R in the House?

October 12, 2003
By CRAIG KELLOGG





For the sort of person who cared desperately about icy
Iittala highball glasses or Alvar Aalto serving trolleys,
Design Research was, from 1953 to 1978, home away from
home. Ray Eames shopped at the Design Research branch in
Beverly Hills, as did Rudi Gernreich. Julia Child preferred
the retailer's Harvard Square flagship store in Cambridge,
Mass., where she borrowed imported cookware for her
television series ''The French Chef.'' And Jacqueline
Kennedy Onassis is said to have discovered her first
Marimekko dress at Design Research in Hyannis, Mass., one
summer. (Ultimately she collected at least eight.)

D/R, as fans called it, forever changed the way America
bought design. As the store's founder, the architect and
teacher Benjamin Thompson, saw it, there was no reason you
couldn't sell contemporary clothing, Joe Colombo chairs and
chic $9 aspen-wood candlesticks under one roof. And before
Williams-Sonoma, Esprit or Apple Computers, D/R sold an
attitude. It was arguably America's first modern lifestyle
retailer, with daisies on the tables and Sonny and Cher on
the stereo. ''Today, you would call it entertainment
retailing,'' says Murray Moss, the founder of the SoHo
design store Moss.

Gordon Segal, the founder and chief executive of Crate &
Barrel -- the chain whose contemporary housewares stores
seem to channel D/R's exuberant spirit -- met Thompson in
the 1960's, when Segal first considered selling Marimekko
products at Crate & Barrel (which recently reintroduced
Marimekko bed and table linens in its stores). Segal
credits Thompson with helping him understand that ''people
want to look at merchandise in lifestyle settings.''
Thompson pioneered the use of frameless windows to thrust
those settings through the storefront, ''making the store
part of the street, and bringing the street inside,'' Segal
says.

Like Martha Stewart's soup-to-nuts example (but certainly
more easygoing), D/R's message was swallowed whole by
consumers. In 1970, Janet Malcolm wrote in The New Yorker
that shopping at D/R was an ''aesthetic experience rather
than an irksome necessity.'' Segal still recalls the fresh
orange juice offered by a pair of blondes who greeted him
at the original Cambridge store, in a renovated wooden row
house. (D/R moved to its concrete-and-glass store, designed
by Thompson, in 1969.) But D/R flattered anyone who walked
through the door. ''I didn't need anything they sold,''
remembers Franklin Getchell, the president and co-owner of
Moss. So why, as a Harvard undergraduate, did he visit D/R
once a week? ''I felt smart when I was there,'' he says.

The architectural establishment, however, did not share
this view. Architects ''looked down on Ben because he did a
store,'' says Jane McCollough Thompson, the editor and
urban planner, who worked for Philip Johnson at the Museum
of Modern Art and who married Ben Thompson in 1969. ''If
you violated the rules of Modernism as Philip Johnson saw
them,'' she explains, ''it was bad manners.'' But Louis
Oliver Gropp, the former editor of House Beautiful,
maintains that Thompson ''made design less pretentious and
more possible for more people'' -- an almost letter-perfect
translation of the mission statement of the Bauhaus.

D/R's philosophy embodied Thompson's architectural goals --
romance, sociability, sensory pleasure and human delight --
completely. ''You realized you were going to live with a
different value system,'' says Franklin Salasky, a partner
in the design firm B5 Studio, who grew up in a traditional
split-level house and first encountered D/R in his teens.
Harvard wives found the original store a thoughtful,
sensuous alternative to hippie bohemia and became cultlike
followers. ''The people who shopped at Design Research
tended to be your kind of people,'' Gropp says.

The stores mixed modern European furniture with utilitarian
crafts and highlights from the Knoll and Herman Miller
catalogs. Many things had previously been available only
through designers -- if at all. ''For me it was pure visual
education,'' says Vicente Wolfe, the decorator and
retailer, who discovered Noguchi paper lanterns at D/R as a
young man. Teddy Edelman, a founder of Edelman Leather,
says, ''We just wallowed in the beauty of what we saw.''
She fell in love with the D/R butcher-board bar cart on
bicycle wheels -- a la Marcel Duchamp -- but it took four
visits to find ''the guts'' to take one home. Finally, she
''decided it was so wonderful that everybody would love
it.'' They did, and she still frequently uses her D/R cart
for cocktails.

The potter and interior designer Jonathan Adler grew up in
the New Jersey suburbs with Thompson's most coveted (and
copied) design, a sofa with goose-down cushions and
off-white Haitian cotton slipcovers. Adler's parents, Harry
and Cynthia, bought a pair of the sofas on the sidewalk in
front of the Manhattan D/R, before the sofas even made it
inside. Four decades later, the same sofas figure
prominently in the apartment Adler decorated for his mother
on Central Park West. She told her son: ''I have to have
them. They're so lavishly made.''

Cynthia Adler wonders whether the family's Marimekko window
shades, also from D/R, ''influenced Jonathan's feeling that
we lived in Design Research.''

Marimekko products ultimately grew to represent about half
of D/R's retail sales. (Next month, the Bard Graduate
Center will open ''Marimekko: Fabrics, Fashion,
Architecture,'' an exhibition on the history of the Finnish
company.) In 1966, Life magazine ran a feature on Marimekko
dresses, which served as a de facto uniform for D/R
employees -- women in short skirts, ''on a ladder, if
possible,'' says Julia McFarlane, who once designed
displays for the stores. McFarlane, who later co-founded
the influential store Ad Hoc Softwares, is now a buyer at
ABC Carpet & Home.

Thompson meant D/R to be a slap at what he called the
''perverse moral dictatorship'' of International Style
modernism. Victoria Borus, now a partner at B5 Studio,
says, ''It was a really free place where it was easy to
have ideas.'' But maybe it was a little too free. When she
worked at the Manhattan store, Borus made what she
describes as an aesthetic choice to keep price tags off the
merchandise. ''The Ben Thompson crew from Boston was open
to rule breaking,'' she says. Which may be why the
lifestyle guru Terence Conran, on his first visit to D/R in
Cambridge, remembers thinking, ''What a charming but
slightly amateur outfit this is.''

Pauline Dora, a former D/R executive who later worked for
Conran, recalls: ''We needed retailing basics. The waste
and excesses at Design Research were unbelievable.''

With stores in Cambridge, New York and San Francisco, the
business struggled to survive. Peter Sprague, an
entrepreneur, gained control of the cash-strapped company
around 1970, in what some have termed a hostile takeover.
Jane Thompson puts it bluntly: ''D/R was stolen.'' Sprague
hired a new president, S. Roger Horchow (who later founded
the Horchow Collection). Horchow's memos, now in the D/R
archive at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, warned
Thompson that D/R knockoffs had begun proliferating at
lower prices in competing stores.

But Thompson, it appears, failed to reply. ''He was trying
to do more than any single person can do,'' Gordon Segal
says. In addition to managing the three stores, Thompson
was designing D/R's new headquarters. The building recently
received the American Institute of Architects' 25-Year
Award (given to buildings which, at 25 to 35 years of age,
retain their original excellence), but it was once a
radical experiment in store planning. Gordon Segal
confronted this when he later converted part of the
building into a Crate & Barrel. ''Think of a store without
walls,'' he says. ''Where do you put the merchandise?''

Sprague says simply, ''It's very hard to impose any kind of
business discipline on very creative people.'' Thompson
sued to regain control of the company, but lost the suit,
and while he maintained a minority interest in the company,
he resigned as its director.

Sprague further expanded the chain, opening a D/R store in
Philadelphia as well as the one in Beverly Hills. But he
also opened stores in malls, to Thompson's growing
distress. The company coasted along until 1978, when D/R
was forced to declare bankruptcy. Thompson, who lost his
entire investment in the company, went on to design
pioneering retail projects like Faneuil Hall Marketplace in
Boston and the South Street Seaport before retiring in
1993. He died in 2002.

Feelings about D/R remain strong, because feelings were
precisely the point. Segal still owns the D/R trademarks,
which he bought in the bankruptcy proceedings. ''Someday we
might revive it,'' he says.

But it was Thompson who best appraised his own place in the
design history of an America he called ''hellbent on
ugliness.'' In 1985, when he was given the Louis Sullivan
Award by the A.I.A., Thompson wrote that ''time is a
merciless judge of the cheap, shoddy and merely
fashionable.''




- bill 10-13-2003 6:25 pm [add a comment]