"When we came into the housewares business in the late 1970s, well-designed products were treated like museum pieces," Umbra's founder and president Les Mandelbaum told me on the phone from Toronto. "We took the approach that said, 'Hey, you can apply good design to all sorts of things.' It doesn't have to be a vase; you can apply it to a trash can or a drapery rod or a picture frame. And it doesn't have to be that much more expensive." As with the Garbo, Mandelbaum manufactures highly designed products and sells them to the masses, driving good taste and challenging design into downmarket outlets like Freddie's. And they're getting rich doing it.
Nobody has gotten more media play out of this downmarket drive than architect Michael Graves, whose signature line of toasters and tea kettles premiered earlier this year in 851 Target stores. But what's fascinating about Graves' Target venture is not how the revered architect is slumming with the polyester masses but how his products are so overdesigned, so straining to signify upscalitude that they actually become vulgar.
Rick Dahms
Crossing the border into Pottery Barn Nation: where "quality" meets the new affordability.
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See for yourself. Drive out to Target in West Seattle. Walk the linoleum squares, smell the yellow popcorn, listen to mothers warn sullen young sons: "Don't start with me!" A few aisles north of the Britney Spears T-shirts and Star Wars slap bands you'll find the Michael Graves section, announced with a Pottery Barnish black-on-blonde-wood sign. There's Graves' signature toaster ($39.99), its cartoonish egg handle suggestive of Goofy fixing breakfast; there's his whimsically rounded can opener ($19.99), his mixer ($29.99), paper-towel holder ($14.99), and ice bucket ($29.99). It's all very . . . condescending. Target displays Graves' designs apart from all the other ice buckets and can openers, as if to lecture its customers: This, you uneducated clods, is good design. But the very fact that Graves' products announce their "designness" like barkers on the midway turns them cheap and tasteless. Good design and tasteful products can, in fact, be found at Target. They're just a few aisles away where, for instance, the sensuous chrome lines of the DeLonghi toaster can be had for that same $39.99.
AFTER WITNESSING THE Graves debacle at Target, I return to Restoration Hardware, where my eyes are opened to the most subtle layer of Stephen Gordon's game. His placards not only give Restoration's products a storied history, they lend the entire store the air of an art gallery. The drawer knobs are displayed against polished fir like works of conceptual art. A single white castor hangs mounted on the wall like a Duchamp readymade. A German-manufactured tape measure is touted as a "Metropolitan Museum award winner." (Of what? It doesn't matter.) It's as if Gordon has hidden an annex to MoMA's design collection in every store. There is exactly one dustpan for sale. It's $15, aluminum, and has exquisite scalloped sides and a beautifully curved handle. There's an old-fashioned corn broom. A can of Zippo lighter fluid. Trust your eye, Gordon tells his customers. Good design is all around you. Follow my lead.
I can handle the corn broom and dustpan, but the shop towels stop me cold. Wrapped like bright red napkins in a wire bucket are a couple dozen "Buffalo Shop Towels," priced at three bucks a five-pack. These are the same cheap rags stored in a bin near the cash register at Schuck's (for $1.99), but Stephen Gordon has lifted them into objets d'art. They are "what your mechanic probably employs for grubby grease and oil messes," the placard tells us, but Gordon's message is unmistakable: It's all about seeing the red. I see and am sold. I walk out of the store with a bag containing five red shop towels, feeling as though my education in good taste has just begun, and that my citizenship in Pottery Barn Nation has been confirmed.
