Local designs served fresh

In one room of the new Apparatus showroom in Manhattan, artisans polish raw brass by hand, meticulously applying finishes to create a patina that looks decades old. In the next room, someone cuts leather and horsehair, and a few steps away, others labour at workbenches, methodically assembling the various pieces into sculptural light fixtures that conjure up a vague industrial past and are imposing enough to transform a space.

“This is the heart and soul of the operation,” said Gabriel Hendifar, who owns the firm with his fiancé, Jeremy Anderson. “Every single component that goes into every single fixture passes through all of these hands.” In roughly 5 years, Apparatus has grown from 2 guys building light fixtures at their dining table to one of the most talked-about American design firms, with a staff of 35, a 10,000-square-foot studio and showroom that officially opens here later this month and a second showroom in Milan.

And all the while, Gabriel and Jeremy have remained steadfast in their commitment to maintain control of the entire process — not just the design, but the manufacturing, sales, packaging and marketing. “There’s this idea of ‘the maker’ that we were very much inspired by, which feels like a thing in New York right now,” Gabriel said. “We were originally in Los Angeles, looking to people like Lindsey Adelman, Jason Miller and David Weeks,” he said, naming three established New York designers who have built their own hands-on fabrication studios.

Gabriel and Jeremy are not the only ones to emulate that model. Dozens of other young firms across the country are following suit. Unlike earlier generations of designers, most of whom sought licensing agreements with large manufacturers, they are taking control of nearly every aspect of production, from initial concept to final product delivery.

Cara McCarty, curatorial director at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, attributes this to a number of factors, including e-commerce and social media. Designers “can sell online and become known in a way that they couldn’t without that technology,” Cara said. “That’s made a huge difference.” But “it’s also an outgrowth of this go-local movement,” she said, drawing a connection to the popularity of artisanal foods and the farm-to-table trend. In the same way that many consumers are turning away from mass-produced foods in favour of the local and homegrown, she said, they are also seeking out small-batch designer goods. And often, she said: “They have an opportunity to impact the final design and actually work with the maker. It’s customised for their interior or taste.”

Whether you think of it as locavore design or simply another by-product of the tech revolution, the “maker” movement is fuelling a resurgence in American design. Not long ago, the real excitement about new design was in Europe, at furniture fairs like the Salone del Mobile, held every April in Milan. But increasingly American design seems to be stealing the spotlight.

“There’s a lot of interest in the European market, from European designers and architects,” said Jacques Barret, founder of Triode gallery in Paris, which has made products by American designers a focus for the past couple of years and is planning an exhibition on Apparatus next month. “People who discover American design are very impressed with the design, the materials and the way it’s done. They design, they make. It’s really different from what we see in Europe.”

New York design

Nick Cope, who runs the wallpaper company Calico in Brooklyn with his wife Rachel, has noticed a different attitude as well. Now, during the Milan furniture fair, “everyone is asking about what’s going on with design in New York and how people are doing this,” he said. The Copes founded their company in 2013 to produce one-of-a-kind wall-size murals. Nick creates original artwork by marbleising paper using traditional methods or painting by hand, and scans the finished pieces into a computer at high resolution.

When a client places an order, the artwork is digitally cropped to ensure that each installation is different, and the non-repeating pattern is printed on rolls of wallpaper that are assembled like a puzzle. “Companies have approached us about licensing things, but for us, working together in this studio and having complete control of production is so meaningful and rewarding,” Rachel said. “It’s part of our lifestyle. We’re in this really lovely community with lots of designers around us.”

Among the other designer-driven workshops on the streets surrounding Calico’s studio is Uhuru, a furniture company founded in 2004 by Jason Horvath and Bill Hilgendorf, who studied industrial design together at the Rhode Island School of Design before starting a small woodworking shop in Brooklyn. “We didn’t want to have to justify what we were trying to do to anyone else or to convince someone to make our stuff,” said Jason. “We just wanted to design it and make it.”

After presenting their first collection at Bklyn Designs in 2006, they soon developed a reputation for creative use of reclaimed materials: ipe from the Coney Island boardwalk; heart-pine beams from the Domino Sugar refinery in Brooklyn; various scraps found on the street. A new collection of brass tables and benches in the works was inspired by the rusty metal straps used to secure boxes to shipping pallets.

Uhuru employs about 70 people in two production facilities, an 8,000-square-foot space in an old warehouse in Brooklyn and a 40,000-square-foot operation in New Holland, Pennsylvania. The company, which opened a showroom in Manhattan last year, fills nearly $1 million in orders every month, Jason said, and to fulfill large commercial jobs like furniture for the new Ace hotels in Pittsburgh and New Orleans, the partners are overseeing additional production in Nicaragua and Vietnam.

Seeds of revolution

Financial necessity, of course, plays a significant role in this. Charlie Miner, the chief executive of WorkOf, an online marketplace for products made by designers, credits the recent financial crisis in particular. “We attribute a lot of this growth to things that happened in the economy in 2007 and 2008,” he said, when students were graduating from design schools with few job prospects. Those individuals began forming independent studios, and a few years later, Charlie said, “the next generation of professional design and manufacturing brands was starting to emerge.”

WorkOf, which earns a commission on products sold through its website, was founded in January 2014 and initially represented 10 design firms, all in Brooklyn. Since then, it has grown rapidly and now offers products from more than 100 design studios across the country.

The recession, however, can’t be blamed for everything. Some designers, like the role models for the partners of Apparatus, have insisted on retaining control of their work for a while now.