“I look forward to bending it in ways that haven’t been done before. “I love the beauty of rattan itself,” he reflects. “It’s just a bigger world.”īut still, it’s a universe that Schwartz uniquely inhabits. “As rattan gets more popular, I won’t be able to refinish it or find it fast enough to supply everybody,” Schwartz says. The pieces she ended up buying not only found their way into a central part of the home, but onto the cover of AD last September.Įven as the pendulum swings in rattan’s favor, there’s a larger problem looming, one of basic pragmatic facts. But when he brought Poppy at the end of a long day of touring furniture shops, “she just absolutely flipped out,” he says. “So I thought that rattan would be the perfect match for her.” Bini, a longtime fan and friend of Schwartz’s, had never before taken a client to Harvey’s warehouse. “Poppy wanted something very Hollywood Regency, a California dream home-light, airy, fun,” says Bini. When designing a home for Poppy and Cara Delevingne, Beverly Hills architect Nicolò Bini wanted to create a tropical feel by blurring the lines between indoor and outdoor, a role rattan was born to play.
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He shows off another Frankl reproduction, a sectional ($14,000), and ticks off its history: “That fabric is from a great company called Full Swing in Rhode Island they went out of business two years ago. They started putting rubber straps and springs beneath cushions.” These, he’s not so into. “In the 1950s they started changing it a lot. “I’ve touched thousands and thousands of pieces,” he says. Schwartz can identify the era of a piece at a glance, by the workmanship. His design and his manufacturing were far superior to everybody else’s,” says Schwartz, who also sells genuine Frankls (he has a sofa for $7,500). “Everyone reproduced him in the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s, but not to his degree of quality. He notes a copy of Frankl’s work, an $8,000 set of pretzel lounge chairs in calming off-white upholstery. His business Tropical Sun Rattan is the last old-school rattan dealer in Los Angeles. He has run his eponymous store, Harvey's on Beverly, for more than four decades. I make it new again.”Īfter a stint in aerospace engineering, Schwartz turned to the furniture business. I refinish it and restore it and then ship it somewhere else. “People all over would have a tiki room made. “Rattan is associated with happiness it’s associated with relaxation and coolness,” says Schwartz, who sources his wares from warm states like Hawaii, Arizona, and New Mexico.
It was Frankl’s reinterpretation of the garish Victorian-style rattan and wicker furniture-especially in his patented six-strand square pretzel chairs and couches-that reinvigorated the style. During the Great Depression, people flocked to the cinema to forget their troubles, which is why a New York City interior designer by the name of Paul Frankl headed to Hollywood. Though woven furnishings have existed since ancient Rome and found renewed popularity in the Victorian era, rattan furniture as we know it today came back to modern America by way of escapism. And it’s not to be confused with wicker, which is a weaving method, although the wood used in some wicker is indeed rattan-which is both very strong and pliable. All of this is true, but rattan isn’t one kind of wood it’s 600 Calimoideae species that are distantly related to the palm plant and native to parts of Africa, Asia, and Australasia.
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