Charles Stendig, who released modern day and avant-garde European furniture to adventurous Individuals in his New York Metropolis showroom, died on Feb. 11 at his household in Manhattan. He was 99.
His loss of life was declared by R & Company, a furniture gallery in TriBeCa to which Mr. Stendig donated his structure library and corporate archives.
There was a time period, starting in the 1960s, when the American dwelling area went cheerfully haywire, getting to be a showcase for place age and Pop Art design. The long run had arrived, and it was plastic and great and brimming with optimism, mirroring the mod revolution in manner. Mr. Stendig had a hand in considerably of it, in search of out European makers, including from Finland, in the days when cargo delivery was low-priced.
Intrepid and gregarious, he was the 1st and, for a time, the only American importer of the Finnish designer Eero Aarnio’s bubble home furniture, like the Ball Chair, a cocoon-like plastic sphere upholstered on the within and frequently accessorized with its possess phone. It had a cameo in the 1960s British tv sequence “The Prisoner” as properly as in other dystopian classics.
On 1 mission, Mr. Stendig flew to Prague, which was then part of the Soviet Bloc, to persuade Thonet manufacturing facility executives to resume producing the 1920s-period bentwood and cane eating chairs that they had stopped developing for the duration of World War II he preferred to import all those as effectively. The catch was that he experienced to promise the creation fees for a yr, as he informed Marisa Bartolucci, a layout writer who profiled him in 2016 for the antiques and fashionable household furniture web-site 1stDibs, in which classic Stendig parts now provide for 1000’s of dollars.
The chance was really worth it. For a time in the late 1960s, the cane chairs, now avatars of modern-day style, appeared ubiquitous in certain American households.
Mr. Stendig also offered the stylish leather-based and chrome home furnishings of Marcel Breuer, the Hungarian-German Bauhaus architect and designer, such as his Wassily Chair, named for the painter Wassily Kandinsky.
In Italy, he embraced the Radical Style motion led by mischievous Italian designers who poked fun at consumerist tradition by making arch and ironic parts, like the Bocca, or else recognized as the Marilyn sofa, a brilliant purple foam and jersey amount in the shape of a pair of lips. Mr. Stendig brought it to his showroom, in Manhattan.
The Bocca was built by the architect Franco Audrito for Studio 65, the style collective he co-founded, and produced by Gufram, a enterprise identified for playful foam pieces, like an agreeably goofy-hunting cactus built by Guido Drocco and Franco Mello. Mr. Stendig bought that one particular, too.
The Marilyn couch was an irresistible Pop Artwork icon, showing up on magazine addresses and evidently scooped up by Hugh Hefner for the Playboy Mansion. However Mr. Stendig sold only 4, as he informed Evan Snyderman, a principal of R & Corporation. Radical stylish did not come cheap, even back again then.
Mr. Stendig imported the wormlike Non-Stop Sofa, an undulating leather creation with sections that zipped alongside one another, ad infinitum, built by Eleonore Peduzzi-Riva, an Italian architect its 9-inch sections cost $155 in 1974 (about $1,000 in today’s forex).
Mr. Stendig was bullish on sectionals. In addition to the Non-Prevent Couch, he offered parts in stretch velour that fit jointly in a 50 percent circle.
Then there was Joe, named for Joe DiMaggio, a adore seat in the shape of a giant leather-based baseball glove, stitching provided, with its excess fat fingers furnishing back again support. When it designed its American debut in Mr. Stendig’s showroom in 1970, it was priced at $1,500 (far more than $12,000 these days) — not an quick promote, as he told The New York Moments.
Joe — designed by a trio of Italian architects, Jonathan De Pas, Donato D’Urbino and Paolo Lomazzi — was integrated in a celebrated exhibition of Italian style and design in 1972 called “The New Domestic Landscape” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
But Mr. Stendig confirmed it very first.
His business was recognized as “to the trade,” which intended he sold to architects and designers, who would then sell the pieces to their clientele. This arrangement led by accident to one of modern-day design’s most enduring and coveted objects.
For a advertising giveaway for Xmas in 1966, Mr. Stendig asked Massimo Vignelli, the Italian designer of New York City’s subway map, among other graphic feats, to style a calendar. At the time, supergraphics — tremendous architectural things of style and styles — were getting a instant. Mr. Vignelli experienced always needed to make a massive calendar with figures you could see from across a studio ground. What he arrived up with was a very simple grid, 3 ft by four toes, with the letters of the days of the week at the top rated and the figures in rows beneath, all rendered in pure black Helvetica type on a white track record and aligned flush left.
The calender was a approximately instant style common, and the Museum of Modern Artwork obtained it for its permanent assortment.
“When you think of the tradition of the marketing calendar, of half-bare ladies sitting down on tractors hung up in fuel stations throughout the country,” Michael Bierut, former vice president of graphic style and design at Vignelli Associates, stated by mobile phone, “what Massimo did was to base the sex attractiveness of his calendar in how major and stunning individuals figures are. It is continue to so contemporary. It’s nearly joyful.”
The calendar is continue to in manufacturing. (Mr. Bierut pointed out that the used sheets make great modernist wrapping paper.)
Suzanne Slesin, a previous design and style reporter for The Moments and now editorial director of Pointed Leaf Push, which publishes style and artwork publications, claimed of Mr. Stendig: “He loved present day home furnishings, and he was owning exciting, and it showed. And he was the only a single showing this wild and excellent contemporary household furniture. He was it.”
Charles William Stendig was born on Oct. 25, 1924, in Brooklyn, the only baby of Irving and Rose (Blum) Stendig. His father was an electrician. Charles served as a paratrooper throughout World War II and then researched business at New York University on the G.I. Monthly bill. He was a traveling salesman of furnishings and tableware on the West Coastline ahead of heading into organization for himself in New York.
In a bar, over a beer, Mr. Stendig met a Finnish trade consultant, who told him that his country’s household furniture sector was booming and invited him to occur to Finland to have a seem.
His visit, in a Finnair prop plane, took 26 hrs and 4 refuels, as he told Ms. Bartolucci. The air terminal was a Quonset hut. But when he was taken to Lahti, Finland’s home furnishings-earning funds, Mr. Stendig was gob-smacked by the pristine factories and the get the job done he saw, by designers like Mr. Aarnio, Ilmari Lappalainen and other folks.
The excursion encouraged him to go into organization on his very own. With a $300 financial loan from Paul Secon, a founder of Pottery Barn, which at the time marketed marginally flawed ceramic “seconds” from a warehouse in Chelsea, Mr. Stendig opened a showroom in 1956 in a Midtown brownstone. That exact 12 months, he married Eleanore Brustein, and they built the organization collectively, opening showrooms in Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Burlington Industries acquired the company in 1971, and the Stendigs stayed on as supervisors until eventually 1976, when the company was acquired all over again. The couple retired and turned to philanthropy, supporting, amid other triggers, the UJA-Federation of New York and sponsoring a scholarship method that introduced Scandinavian students to research design and style in the U.S. referred to as “Thanks to Scandinavia.”
Ms. Stendig died in 2012. Mr. Stendig leaves no immediate survivors.
