Jim Walrod: New York Times; December 1, 2002

December 1, 2002
What A Design Guru Really Does
By Jaime Wolf for The New York Times

On a fall afternoon, Jim Walrod is walking east on Houston Street, eyes open, scanning junk-shop and furniture-store windows, stopping at several to inspect a lamp or a chair or an unclassifiable gewgaw. Today's mission is to find a couple of suitable 1940's-era pieces for the office of the president of Capitol Records. Stopping to light a cigarette, he says, ''So last night I was at this dinner party, and I got into a fight with this girl -- she called me a decorator.''

His voice rises above its normal soft-spoken register as he says: ''I told her, 'I'm not a decorator -- I don't have a Yorkshire terrier!' She said, 'Well, are you an architect?'

I said no. She said, 'Do you design things?' No. 'You do interiors?' I said yeah. She said, 'Then you're a decorator.' And I said, 'But you don't understand -- I'm not!''

Walrod is a lanky 39-year-old with a long face, deep-set blue eyes and a healthy sense of the absurd. Ask about his old apartment in Jersey City, which he once furnished by meticulously recreating the 1943 Museum of Modern Art Good Design exhibit, and he'll tell you about the thieves who broke in and didn't think there was anything worth taking. Those who know him -- and it is a wide circle of acquaintance, encompassing architects, designers, artists, collectors, rock stars, hotel and restaurant owners and magazine writers with whom he maintains a nearly constant dialogue -- wouldn't call him a decorator, but that doesn't mean they have a better word at hand.

He may know everything about the history of design (the phrase ''walking encyclopedia'' is often invoked) and the intertwining stories of important designers, architects, manufacturers, model builders, museum shows and articles in obscure back issues of Domus. But he isn't a curator or academic; in fact, he does not even have a college degree.

Discovering a neglected Louis Kahn building in Trenton or an unknown Richard Neutra house in western Pennsylvania, Walrod may get sufficiently enthusiastic to reach out to philanthropists in an attempt to save them, but he's also not a preservationist.

If he regularly happens upon things like the tiny stall on St. Marks Place whose owner paints and hand-customizes Converse high-top sneakers and calls up friends to tell them about it, no one would call Walrod a cool-hunter.

And if he scouts and buys furniture for clients, if his friend Mike D of the Beastie Boys once referred to Walrod in Rolling Stone as his ''furniture pimp,'' and even if he formerly owned and ran a succession of influential used-furniture shops in Manhattan that helped to create the present-day vogue for midcentury modernism, he is clearly much more than a dealer.

But even the people for whom he buys or, increasingly in recent years, the people who have brought him in and paid him handsomely to collaborate on the conceptualization, design, decor and construction of ambitious public spaces like the Park restaurant in Chelsea and the Downtown Standard hotel in Los Angeles or acclaimed young artists like Tom Sachs, who regularly confers with him, and Toland Grinnell, who says, ''Almost everything that I've done that I would consider major over the last couple of years, I would link to something that Jim said'' -- even these people, the design and style elite, cannot say precisely what Walrod does.

When the award-winning hotelier André Balazs, owner of the Mercer Hotel in SoHo, and the Chateau Marmont, Standard and recently opened Downtown Standard in Los Angeles, calls Walrod ''the ultimate design raconteur,'' he might be getting close to the mark. Walrod long ago developed a casual manner that often makes working with him seem like hanging out and shooting the breeze. But in the course of conversation, his command of the history will bring pieces of design to life -- a chair by Carlo Molino, for instance, won't be just a chair, but a chair created by a man who also raced cars, flew planes and made a series of pornographic photographs of Italian streetwalkers seated in that chair. Or the house in Weehawken that Walrod wants to save, which wasn't only designed by a close associate of Walter Gropius's but was also originally commissioned by Josef von Sternberg, later sold to an eccentric baroness who was famous for supporting jazz musicians like Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk and was ultimately, it turns out, the place where Monk died.

Crucially, Walrod is an extremely knowledgeable cultural historian, a connoisseur of subcultural movements, tabloid scandals and esoteric behind-the-scenes heroes, and thereby able to connect the G.I. Bill to the emergence of a particular school of 1950's California modernism, the decline of Polynesian-style tiki restaurants to the establishment and enforcement of drunk-driving laws and the importance of Victor (Trader Vic) Bergeron to the development of the canonical American mixed-drink menu. (''The mai tai, yeah, all of that,'' Walrod says. ''But he also invented the margarita! And convinced everyone it was what Mexicans drank!'')

In Jersey City parlance, Jim Walrod might be ''the guy behind the guy,'' someone whose synthetic knowledge and sensibility exert a widespread, distinct and yet invisible influence on people whose design and style choices directly affect popular taste and trends. Because his friends and collaborators are primarily people with well-developed, sophisticated aesthetics, it would be a mistake to say that Walrod is responsible for, or the originator of, their taste and orientation. But he is able to focus them more sharply and take them deeper in the direction they're already going: to say, as he did when told that the president of Capitol Records liked the retro feel of some of Christian Liagre's furniture, ''If you like Liagre, then you should know about Rene Gabriel, who designed a set of chairs for a hotel on the Left Bank in the 40's that Liagre ripped off.''

Whatever else he is, Jim Walrod has become a taste maker's taste maker.

As a teenager in Jersey City, it was uncool for Walrod to admit an interest in art. He cut class as his friends did, but when he did, he would go across the river to the Museum of Modern Art. When he was 17, he found himself an unlucky bystander during a dispute at a local dry cleaner: the store owner killed the other customer and shot Walrod in the leg, an injury that laid him up for some eight months. During that time, he began studying old movies and reading voraciously about art and design. The following year, a chance meeting on Lexington Avenue with Andy Warhol led to a salesclerk job at Fiorucci, the legendary style epicenter of the late 70's and early 80's. There Walrod encountered Etorre Sottsass and his Memphis cohort, as well as many of the members of the punk-influenced downtown scene, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Fab 5 Freddy and Fred Schneider of the B-52's.

The Memphis designers' obsession with 1950's American style led Walrod to begin investigating its roots himself, and his discovery of postwar midcentury modernism gave him a focus when he established his first used-furniture shop on Lafayette Street in 1987. His tireless enthusiasm, sharp eye and talent for researching the history of the pieces he sold brought him a reputation and an increasingly influential clientele over the subsequent decade. And in 1998, just as the retro-modern style he had championed reached a critical mass of popularity, Walrod opened an ambitious store in SoHo called Form & Function, displaying modern furniture and design objects as if in a museum gallery. Predictably, the inventory went far beyond the standard Eames, George Nelson and Eero Saarinen pieces into such items as plastic transistor radios of the early 70's and the work of lesser-known California modernists like Greta Grossman and Luther Conover. The presentation was rigorously done, but it also managed to be casual and inviting. It was the first example on a large scale of Walrod's talent for creating a unique atmosphere. The success of the store drew people who wanted to talk to Walrod about more than just furniture.

The past decade has given rise to a new class of impresario: hoteliers, restaurateurs and club owners like André Balazs, Jonathan Morr, Sean MacPherson and Eric Goode, who have mastered the art of place-making, transforming a commercial space into a sophisticated, metaphorically rich experience. ''It's almost like a movie, what we do,'' Balazs explains. ''We put together a director, writer, costume designer, and then script and 'produce' a hotel, if you will.''

Jim Walrod knows all of these men and has worked with most of them. He is peculiarly attuned to the ways in which a properly designed environment expresses a cultural era and, conversely, how the currents of culture at any point in time dictate the relevant modes of style and design.

''When you create a space,'' says Jonathan Morr, who owns Bond Street, APT and Théo in New York, ''it's not about design, really. It's not even about taste. It's about creating a feel, and a lot of designers don't have that. Jim gets into it immediately. A lot of times, I don't even agree with him, but it doesn't matter. You don't have to like the orange couch. If it works, it works.''

Two and a half years ago, when the designer Serge Becker began working out the design for Balazs's Downtown Standard hotel in Los Angeles, he quickly realized that the ''rogue businessman'' mythology that he and André Balazs wanted to evoke dovetailed perfectly with Walrod's longstanding research into the heyday of ''bachelor pad'' style, extending roughly from the mid-50's to the early 70's. At Becker's request, Walrod plundered a lengthy proposal he and Julia Chaplin had prepared for a documentary film on the subject to create a 60-page book of appropriate imagery, much of which subsequently found its way into the imaginative interiors that Shawn Hausman created for the hotel.

Soon afterward, Walrod found himself in a used-furniture shop on the Lower East Side, confronting a vintage 1968 Omnibus interlocking sofa, designed by the furniture designer Vladimir Kagan. Walrod, of course, was familiar with, and had long admired, Kagan's work. In the 50's, Kagan had designed a bedroom for Marilyn Monroe and the all-plastic Monsanto House of the Future for Disneyland. The Omnibus, Walrod realized, with all of its lines occurring at knee level and waist level, exuded a powerful suggestiveness entirely in keeping with the plan for the Downtown Standard.

After showing it to Balazs, he was able to commission Kagan to create a supersize Omnibus installation, spread out across the enormous hotel lobby. It was the largest single commission of Kagan's career, bringing him back into the spotlight and creating renewed demand for his work.

Kagan, who marvels that when they first met Walrod knew more about the details and circumstances of his career than he did himself, likens their collaboration in designing and executing the customized Omnibus to that of an actor and director: ''He was the director. It was his vision.''

Hired by Sean MacPherson and Eric Goode to help conceive their Northern California-themed restaurant, the Park, Walrod had a special inspiration for the V.I.P. lounge, based around the notion of decadent privilege folded over on itself. ''I started thinking about Aristotle Onassis and how he wanted the stools in his apartment in the Olympic Towers to be made from the world's rarest material, so he used whale foreskins,'' Walrod says. ''This sensibility of nothing being good enough. So I thought about the Mies van der Rohe Barcelona Chair, the most perfect thing ever made -- what would Eurotrash do? They would dip it in gold to make it better.'' And so he did just that. ''I've heard people say, 'Oh, this is the most beautiful room I've ever seen!''' Walrod says. ''And it's the most offensive thing I've ever worked on.''

Earlier this year, Doug Levine, the founder of Crunch Fitness, approached Walrod about creating a new design scheme for Crunch's interiors. In 2001, Bally Total Fitness had purchased Crunch in a deal valued at $90 million, retaining Levine as a consultant to oversee the conversion of Bally's gym locations to the Crunch brand. The new design would be part of the process.

To give a preliminary sense of what they were looking for, Levine and Candy Tree, Crunch's marketing director, presented Walrod with a group of images that, to their surprise, he immediately recognized. Approximately half were taken from a magazine spread depicting the apartment of the longtime head of DC Comics, Jenette Kahn, an old friend of Walrod's and one of his earliest clients and boosters. Most of the pieces in the photos -- colorful, oversize examples of 60's pop and postmodernist furniture -- Walrod had originally sold to, or tracked down for, Kahn.

The remaining photos were of spaces designed by Shawn Hausman, the interior designer who also does work for motion pictures and who had collaborated with Sean MacPherson on Bar Marmont and with André Balazs on his hotels. During the planning and implementation of the latter project, he and Walrod had discovered a common sensibility extending beyond the construction of the Kagan sofa, and Hausman had continued to use Walrod as a sounding board and consigliere throughout the process of designing the rooftop bar, ground-floor restaurant and guest rooms -- the finished verions of which all contain elements directly traceable to Walrod's original bachelor-pad stylebook. ''When I do a project,'' Hausman says, ''I try and find my own narrative for design, putting layers together to create a fictitious history. Jim gets that narrative thing.''

Seeing the direction Levine and Tree wanted to go in, it was natural for Walrod to suggest that Hausman be brought into the project as well, and at the beginning of the summer the pair of them toured the first two gyms slated for conversion, at Wall Street and Kips Bay (another two will follow this year in Boston and San Francisco).

The basic Crunch atmosphere is already colorful and playful, ''a fantasy playground,'' as Candy Tree puts it, and the bright pop elements and sight gags incorporated into the existing Crunch design immediately suggested the oversize Claes Oldenburg-inspired 1960's Italian pop furniture that Walrod and Hausman loved. (As a furniture dealer, Walrod had long evangelized for the plastic and foam rubber creations of Eero Aarnio, Gaetano Pesce and Joe Colombo, originally to the befuddlement of customers, who would walk in and ask if the pieces were for children.) Taking that period as a departure point, Walrod and Hausman established a design vocabulary that could be fun and enhance the gym experience and yet also be provocative and resonant.

Pushing the whimsy to a cartoonish dimension, they have suggested installing such things as a carnival strong man's Test of Strength in the gym's weight area, a slide connecting the two levels of the Kips Bay location, a 40-foot-tall boxing bag extending from the ceiling all the way to the basement, creating the possibility of people participating in a communal workout on different floors, and a backyard stretching area on fake grass, intended to evoke a surreal garden. In a gesture of dark humor, Walrod and Hausman's stretch mats are imprinted with the shape of a crime-scene chalk outline of a body.

Keeping in mind the need to balance standardized design elements with individual site- and city-specific details, they prepared five books of appropriate furnishings, as well as sketches for color schemes, lighting designs and graphical treatment of the walls and floors, which Levine and Tree could choose from on an à la carte basis. Several of the pieces they have recommended are landmarks of Italian design, like Joe, a sofa designed by a trio of architects in 1970 in the shape of an enormous baseball glove, or a communal seating system called the Safari, designed by the archizoom collective.

''Something like an archizoom Safari, it's an esoteric piece, so when you look at it, it seems playful -- it has leopard skin and communal seating, from above it has the internal outline of a flower,'' Walrod says. ''But the concept behind it -- archizoom wrote manifestoes on antidesign with Ettore Sottsass! In an everyday gym where people go, even in a Crunch, where people expect playfulness and gags, we've been able to slip in a legitimate piece of design. I don't expect the person who's spending half an hour on a treadmill to understand anything about archizoom, but if they look at it and go, 'Wow, that's really cool,' you've got half the battle won.''

Although Walrod now earns a six-figure salary from his various consultations, it is clear that money doesn't motivate him nearly as much as the same enthusiasms for cool, interesting, provocative stuff that drove him 20 years ago, when he first discovered design. ''There's a lack of ego there,'' Doug Levine says. ''He just wants the end product to be truly unique and special. And that's rare.''

According to Toland Grinnell: ''There are always people in the community who don't get written into the history. In every scene, there are like two or three Walrods -- you need that floating free radical. You look back in history and can't believe that someone was doing deconstructive French cuisine at the same time that someone else was doing deconstructive furniture, because there was some Jim Walrod visiting both places. It's like a bee delivering pollen.''

Currently, Walrod is consulting on a cafe for a young entrepreneur named Joel Fitzpatrick. Fitzpatrick wants his place to evoke a feeling of Old World solidity and class. Walrod takes him on a tour of New York City establishments with Old World elements he might want to borrow -- the removable center dividers on the closely packed tables at the former speakeasy Chumley's, allowing four-tops to be cloven instantly into a pair of tables for two; the classicism of gold-leaf signage painted on the plate-glass window of a West Village restaurant; enormous burlap sacks of coffee beans sitting open on the floor at Porto Rico Importing on Bleecker Street, their aroma filling the room.

Later on, I ask Walrod about his eclecticism, how he can love this kind of premodern classicism and antidesign design at the same time.

''Design is design,'' he answers. ''Good design just shows itself through everything. It hums. Do I think anyone's ever going to walk into some place I worked on and go, 'This guy's a design genius'? No. I hope that maybe for the first time they'll be able to enjoy some piece of design that wouldn't have been available to them otherwise. My background in Jersey City -- I wasn't exposed to this. I always thought it was for the rich, in books, in House Beautiful from 1958 or in films. It wasn't in my friends houses or anywhere I went. If I could've had that exposure walking into a gym or a hotel or anywhere like that, I couldn't tell you where my imagination would have gone today.''