My book Design Research: The Store That Brought Modern Living to American Homes is back in print (and the 500 backorders should soon be fulfilled).
It is also being sold at Crate & Barrel (one of the stores inspired by D/R’s example, and a longtime seller of Marimekko). Under “Home Accents.” Not sure what to think.
About the third question everyone asks about my book on the pioneering design store Design Research was the one everyone really wants to ask: where, today, can you shop like D/R?
The short answer is, you can’t. I’ve complained about how design appreciation these days seems entirely focused on shopping, and described a few places where shopping is still sociable, but the mix of price, information and scale at D/R doesn’t happen in the little beautifully curated shops along Smith Street or in the glacial chains of modernism. And besides, who shops like that anymore? The real merchants have moved online.
One student asked about Etsy, and for this I had a ready answer: Yes, I think Etsy preserves a little of the consumer joy and discovery of D/R in its heydey, along with the color that seems drained from much mass-market apparel and housewares. And yes, I think the site is doing its best to create sociability in an online environment. That they need their own merchants to subdivide the plenty is clear: that’s the point of the Treasury (I made one, featuring yellow, here) and the new Taste Test. Let’s get the modernists away from the knitting as soon as possible.
And now I have a shortcut for you: in a Guest Curator post, I have shopped Etsy for D/R’s enduring goods. Don’t you need a little Ruska in your life?
Jane Thompson and I appear on this week’s Design Matters with Debbie Millman, a half-hour(ish) podcast distributed via Design Observer. We taped the show last Friday, and it was a lot of fun. So nice to be asked for your opinion.
The main topic of conversation is our book, Design Research: The Store That Brought Modern Living to American Homes, but we also covered Marimekko, Jane’s brilliant career, design retail today, and why I write about the 1950s so often (it’s not just nostalgia, it’s personal).
I hope you will listen.
Design Research, the book and the store, in T. Hard copy this weekend, with bonus profile written by me of the amazing German toy designer Renate Muller (who is so D/R). More on that later.
Pilar Viladas writes:
In their prologue, the authors characterize Design Research as ‘‘a warm, eclectic, colorful and international version of modernism, one that mixed folk art and Mies van der Rohe, Noguchi and no-name Bolivian sweaters, offering newlyweds and Nobel Prize winners one-stop shopping for tools to eat, sleep, dress, even to party in a beautiful way.’’ By the time D/R closed (Thompson had lost control of the company eight years earlier), it had attracted a fan club that included Julia Child and Jackie Kennedy, and influenced retailers like Gordon Segal, the founder of Crate & Barrel, and Rob Forbes, who founded Design Within Reach. In his foreword to Thompson and Lange’s book, Forbes said that in 2000, when he conducted a customer survey of influential design stores, Design Research came out on top — and it had been closed for 22 years.
Read the rest of One-Stop Living here. Book also covered this week by Cool Hunting, ReadyMade and Mark Lamster (who didn’t know he had D/R to thank—in a roundabout way—for the very dishes from which he ate childhood dinners. Good taste starts young). Thanks all.
I was in Cambridge over Labor Day, and stopped on Brattle Street to see the latest inhabitant of the Design Research Headquarters (Crate & Barrel decamped in 2008): Anthropologie. On the surface I thought Anthro was a good fit for the building. Like Ben Thompson’s D/R, it is a retailer deeply invested in display, with a consistent aesthetic that spreads from clothing to housewares to accessories, and shoppers who combine objects and fabrics from around the world. There’s even, often, color, particularly in the bedding.
And yet, when I got there and walked around, the floor-to-ceiling windows looked dead. There was a bob of buoys, here a room setting of distressed wood and tightly belted dresses. The silhouette they are selling this fall is everything women were rebelling against when they embraced the sack silhouette of Marimekko, sold at D/R. And the colors seemed muted, washed out by a thousand fake suns so that they look like they are from the 1950s. When you’ve spent three years looking at the patterns of Vuokko Nurmesniemi and Maija Isola, it can all seem rather mumsy. Needlepoint, anyone? The great dress Peggy wore in the last episode of Mad Men was far bolder in print and (odd) color combination than anything they are selling now.
They also don’t get the building. Thompson created a seamless flow from outdoors to indoors by continuing Brattle Street’s brick sidewalk through the corner glass vestibule. They have added a mat (probably practical for winter), and a cheap-looking light wood floor on the first level. It is the wrong wood for the period, and it needlessly complicates the path. In the windows themselves, the display people have blocked the views across and up and down the store with little lobster-shack roomettes. Like Crate & Barrel, Anthro couldn’t figure out how to display without a back wall to the display windows and adding more architecture (the D/R team hung things from the ceiling, or piled thin chairs to make a see-through structure). Whatever you build looks flimsy in comparison to concrete, and mucks up the visual access. It is as if retailers don’t know what to do with a space that’s grand.
[My mother points out the additional weakness of the signage: the D/R sign was in neon, and so big it was set on the back wall and could still be seen from the street. Notice how dinky Anthro’s lettering looks, the gold blending into the concrete, the delicate shadow, and the placement too high for the pedestrian to notice. I give them six month before they apply vinyl letters to the glass.]
The clothes, and the display, are the wrong scale.
In thinking about scale, the bigness of Marimekko in comparison to Anthropologie’s current patterns, my mind drifted to one of the most famous wearers of Marimekko, Jackie Kennedy. And from her to Michelle Obama. Think about the difference in scale, substance, presence of these two women. In photographs Jackie holds her own, but when she starts to speak, a little girl voice comes out. Michelle does not have this problem, nor is she a shrinking pastel violet when it comes to clothes (see the Michelle Obama Look Book on The Cut). The choices she makes in Moschino, Tracy Reese, SUNO all seem like pale imitations of the wildness of 1960s Marimekko. It is still bigger than anything we wear today.
Jackie’s Marimekko was relatively tame, though pink and orange were not often seen together at the time. When I imagine Michelle Obama in Marimekko it is one of the larger, brighter prints, the ones you could practically see from across Harvard Square, like this contemporary Kruuna dress. She wore hot pink Isabel Toledo to the National Design Awards luncheon where (and I have photographic proof) she leafed through award winner Jane Thompson and my D/R book. So Marimekko could be in her future.
Obama could handle big pink and orange spots, and so can Ben Thompson’s Design Research Headquarters. It is lovely that a retailer interested in color and print and the crossover of dressing and living has moved in to D/R, but I can’t help wanting to shake Anthropologie up. Be bold! Florals don’t have to be mumsy. Knobs don’t have to have floral. Hot pink does wonders.
Robert Campbell, the Boston Globe’s architecture critic, takes a look at Design Research: The Store That Brought Modern Living to American Homes and declares that Cambridge lived the modern life first.
Actually, it was Cambridge half a century ago when a Brattle Street emporium sparked an American revolution in domestic taste.
A new book, just off the presses, recalls that era: “Design Research: The Store That Brought Modern Living to American Homes.’’ The principal author is Jane Thompson, widow of Ben Thompson, the architect who created Design Research, or D/R for short.
Here’s where I feel compelled to point out that this book, while instigated by Jane, was a collaboration. It seems awfully rude not to mention Jane Thompson’s co-author, otherwise known as me.
The simplest way to sum up Thompson’s contribution to modernism is to say that he added sensuality. Much of modernism drew its inspiration from industrial technology, which was perceived as the new zeitgeist of the 20th century. That kind of modernism could be elegant, but it was often dry and intellectual. “Less is more,’’ famously said the great modernist Mies van der Rohe.
Ben and Jane Thompson liked modern clarity and simplicity, but nobody would accuse them of believing that less is more. D/R was a feast for the senses. There were always flowers, fabrics, music, colors, textures, patterns, and natural materials like wood, not to mention Bloody Marys and beautiful young Finns in Marimekko.
Much more, plus a lovely slideshow of the D/R products in Jane Thompson’s Cambridge home (including the Thonet cafe chairs, pictured above, which Ben Thompson painted all kinds of brights) here.
What do Design Research, the Apple stores and the Brooklyn Flea have in common? Read my latest essay on Design Observer to find out.
D/R’s founder, architect Benjamin Thompson, wanted to turn shopping into less of a chore, more of a creative enterprise. Thompson wrote in the Boston Globe in 1971, 18 months after his glass-walled, concrete-framed new D/R headquarters opened in Cambridge: “Just as Harvard Yard is an agora and Washington Street a fair, D/R lives in the tradition of the marketplace. Because good markets and fairs thrive on movement and action, they don’t happen in architectural “masterpieces” but in lively spaces that mix people and functions.”
Thompson’s thinking about “lively spaces that mix people and functions” led him to a second career, during and after D/R, as the joint inventor, designer and planner of the “festival marketplace” with wife Jane Thompson. As in the D/R stores, their idea at Faneuil Hall (and later Harbor Place and South Street Seaport) was to enliven old buildings with new shopping, eating and mingling experiences, curating (to appropriate a trendy word) the stores as he had curated the D/R merchandize for a mix of price points and audiences, and adding lots of free performances, classes, and good smells. However sad the festival marketplaces now seem, overrun with chain stores and tourist restaurants, the Thompsons’ ideas about retail — hand-selecting the goods, maximizing the sidewalk display, re-using past architecture — are still at work today.
If you like what you read, please buy my new book, written with Jane Thompson, Design Research: The Store That Brought Modern Living to American Homes.
