Ward Bennett is a hands-on designer. Four summers ago in Maine, he came upon a simple turn-of-the-century wooden chair and, finding it unusually comfortable, transformed it into a ready-made full-scale model. Taking out the tools of his trade-strips of reed, pieces of bamboo-he began bending, tying and nailing them to the chair. “Only by working with the materials, only by bending the reed could I get a new form,” Bennett says. The result: the glamorous Wraparound chair that, for many, is the high point of his new 22 piece collection of furniture for Geiger International.
After several years in eclipse, Bennett is back in the design spotlight. His new chairs, desks, tables and credenzas, introduced at the International Design Center of New York’s fall showcase, were the hit of the season. The slightly reduced scale of the collection responds to the trend to shrinking executive offices-and to the increasing number of smaller, female executives-in the ’90s. The pieces are elegantly crafted and residential enough in look that crossover sales should be excellent. Because of Bennett’s concern for the environment, maple, ash, birch and cherry were used instead of endangered tropical woods such as mahogany and rosewood. For the high end furniture market, the prices are fairly moderate-most of the chairs cost around $1,350, the tables around $6,000.
The new furniture is far warmer and more expressive than the austere contemporary look that is Bennett’s hallmark. The dramatic Wraparound chair was inspired by an evening dress by Vionnet; the subtly arched Ledoux desk and chair by that 18th-century architect’s Gates of Paris. Bennett’s fascination with the French method of bracing towers from within led to the Tri-X table’s cross-braced legs and to the cruciform cutout of the Belvedere chair. The Bridge sofas and chairs rest on an arching framework similar to those that underpin bridges throughout France. By translating these ancient structural devices into appealing, viable forms, Bennett has come up with truly original work. Design critic and freelance curator Martin Filler says, “Ward never does versions of other things. He just doesn’t think that way. He’s the one who’s always knocked off by other designers.”
Bennett has surprised, even confounded, the design world before. To some, he is an “artistic genius” and a “wise guru”; others call him “egotistical.” With almost no formal training, the 73-year-old designer has been amazingly versatile, confidently taking on office and apartment interiors, flatware, crystal, textiles, luggage, even whole houses, including landscaping and swimming pools. Several patterns of his stainless-steel flatware for Sasaki are top sellers at Bloomingdale’s and are in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York and the Museum of Modern Art. Bennett recently agreed to refurbish a stucco-clad concrete house in East Hampton, N.Y., that he designed both inside and out in the late ’60s. He’ll also create a tennis court, a second pool and a guest pavilion for the house’s new owner, Jann Wenner, publisher of Rolling Stone magazine.
That’s a pretty hefty project for a septuagenarian. But Bennett’s a hard worker who’s been on his own from the age of 13. He left New York in the early ’30s and began traveling the globe, earning his living as a fashion illustrator and studying art and design informally with such masters as Brancusi and Le Corbusier. He may have learned the most, Bennett says, from seeing their homes and studios, how they lived. Back in New York, he studied sculpture but gave it up in the late’ 40s to design interiors. He formulated a minimalist philosophy that reflected his strong interest in Far Eastern religion and the ideas of such writers as Thoreau. “Our life is frittered away by detail … Simplify, simplify,” remains a favorite Bennett quote.
Many designers say that Bennett’s heyday was in the early ’60s, when he devised everything from conference rooms to cutlery for David Rockefeller’s vast, art-filled Chase Manhattan headquarters in New York City (their nofrills style may have fallen out of fashion, but the rooms don’t look dated even today). Bennett’s serene environments were much sought after by the moneyed set during that decade. His work became highly influential. When he built Turkish banquettes into the walls of a room and covered them with carpeting, the concept was copied by other designers and led to built-in platform seating, conversation pits and, eventually, the U-shaped sofa so popular throughout the ’60s and ’70s. Bennett inspired the high-tech movement as well by being among the first to use such items as subway grating, hospital fixtures and theatrical lighting in interiors.
But the manic pace of freelance decorating eventually gave Bennett an ulcer. By 1970, he was refusing most jobs. “Decorating just takes too much time,” he now says. “I don’t like to get involved with people and their families, with choosing a pink.” He began to focus on his line of chairs for Brickel Associates. Spurred on by a back injury that he suffered while skiing, Bennett always focused on making chairs that “truly support the human anatomy.” He has designed more than 150 of them in his career. His “pull-up” model, a sleek barrelshaped chair, usually upholstered and trimmed generously with wood, is one of the most widely copied pieces of furniture ever, says critic Filler, who did extensive research on it in 1985 in order to include it in that year’s Whitney Museum show on 20th-century American design.
Bennett and Brickel parted company in the late ’80s - a break the designer had desired for some time. Now he is free to work for anyone he wants to. Since 1984, Bennett has spent some five months each year in a small pied-a-terre in Paris-the other months are divided between his apartment atop the Dakota on Central Park in Manhattan (two rooftop servants’ rooms that he bought in 1963 for $7,000) and a studio in East Hampton. He plans his days around yoga, friends, his dog Mishka, the arts - but most of all, he continues to design. With new furnishings for the offices of Rolling Stone on his mind, this complex legend in his own time says happily, “I think I’m better than I’ve ever been.”
