Improbable Beginnings

Sam Grawe, former brand director for enigmatic designer Herman Miller, was happy living with his wife and son in the San Francisco Bay area for 15 years. In fact, when the family began toying with the idea of moving to Michigan so Sam could be closer to Miller’s headquarters, the couple had just purchased an Eichler home in upscale Marin County.
Despite the sudden change in lifestyle, the Grawes managed to find the perfect home in Grand Rapids (about an hour away from Miller’s headquarters). Designed by local architect Richard Wright in the 1970s, Sam recalls being particularly smitten by the big bronze panels hanging on its front doors. Coupled with the rest of the home’s architecture, that bronze proved irresistible. “It just seemed like this totally bizarre, Brutalist, postmodern house,” he recalls.

Visionary Potential

The Grawes immediately saw the potential hidden behind the home’s 70s trappings, which had obviously been built to the highest possible standards of the decade. An intercom system had been installed for communication between all rooms, the home’s walls were covered with upscale Evelyn Ackerman wood panels interspersed with elegant grasscloth, and chic teak parquet floors abounded. A particularly opulent Koi pond even graced the landing of the central stairway.

Not long after they moved in, Grawe started doing some rough sketches of his visions for the house in Adobe Illustrator and presented them to Becker & Sanders, a local contractor recommended to him by a fellow Herman Miller associate.
Eventually, every floor and wall in the home was resurfaced, otherwise altered, or removed entirely. The Grawes notably knocked out a wall in the dining room and got rid of a kitchen bar. Simultaneously, they also preserved several aspects from the original design, including the unique front doors (sans the brass panels) and their diminutive rosewood door handles, as well as the striking brown glazed bricks in the foyer.

Since both Grawes are passionate about cooking, it’s no surprise that their kitchen was completely overhauled, with matching state-of-the-art appliances now filling the space and a charming nook displaying their cookbook collection on one end. The room’s rough walls (and the walls all throughout the home) were smoothed out to soft, silky finishes, and huge skylights were put in above the central staircase to flood the space with natural light. Original furniture pieces are mingled with new styles to strike an ideal balance. Sam was particularly delighted to find a classic George Nelson coffee table from the 1960s for the home — a piece he’d desired for a long time.

The Grawes did nothing to alter the house’s exterior, as they already felt that it was perfect, including the windows graced with Romanesque arch detailing. Although the family will soon be moving out of the dream house, they cherish the memories they have of watching their sons grow up in it and will never forget its magical ambiance. “Even when there’s snow covering the skylights, light in the house is always great, no matter [the] season,” Sam fondly reminisces.

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The Exhibition

“Night Fever” is the ideal moniker for the exhibition. It stars Studio 54, which was the place to be in the 70s. The New York nightclub was a hedonist haven, and its ceiling comprised of a mass of TV monitors that showed patrons sweating and writhing with abandon down below. When this landmark closed down at the start of the 1980s, the Palladium became the new “place to be.” Run by the same owners, it quickly became a favorite haunt of avant-garde artists from around the world, including regular Andy Warhol. A display dedicated to artist extraordinaire Keith Haring’s gigantic mural of people dancing under the TV monitors is another huge draw at the exhibition.

Relics from other celebrated clubs of the era include a section of the dance floor from the Hacienda, the Manchester club closely linked to the explosion of rave culture in Britain, and an impressive scale model of Berlin’s landmark dance club Berghain. Patrons who yearn to hear the sounds that once reverberated around the world and influenced the culture so intensely will be happy to know that the exhibition also features an interactive sound room, complete with mirrors to set the mood.

Earlier Trailblazers

Lest the world think that these crazy historic clubs sprang up overnight, this nostalgic exhibition also contains a few earlier influences from the 60s. Cerebrum, a fleeting New Yorkclub that was open for less than a year between 1968 and 1969, was a bizarre mix of music and performance art, with patrons dressed in white robes being escorted around by club personnel and interacting with 360-degree psychedelic projections. This experience, designed to transport visitors on an all-encompassing head-trip, was featured on the cover of Life magazine and called a “cabaret for the mind.” Jochen Eisenbrand, the exhibition’s chief curator, says: “These early clubs created really immersive environments… It was a sort of virtual reality environment, if you will.”

The Electric Circus in New York’s East Village also promoted guest interaction in addition to dancing. A 1967 write-up in The New York Times captured the essence of the club’s atmosphere, describing the way “a model in a purple and silver polka dot jumpsuit sailed through the air in the Electric Circus discothèque Monday night and landed in the arms of a man dressed as a gorilla.”

Predictions for the Future

Nightclubs of all types are struggling around the world. Between 2005 and 2015, half of Britain’s clubs closed, and 38 percent of the clubs in the Netherlands closed between 2001 and 2011. People have attributed this decline in clubbing to several things, including a greater emphasis on health than hedonism and the fact that people no longer need clubs to meet prospective partners. Many major European cities have hired “night mayors” to figure out what should come next. Stay tuned to find out what the kids of the future will be doing for fun — and where they’ll doing it.

The post “Night Fever” Showcases Extraordinary Dance Clubs of Yesteryear first appeared on Dornob.

The Hustle

The US quickly embraced disco in the 1970s, but the movement was actually born in Italy in the mid-1960s — around the same time that Fratelli Gugliermetto established the furniture manufacturer Gufram. Giorgio Ceretti, Pietro Derossi, Riccardo Rosso and the other radical architects of the era designed a number of Italy’s most posh discotheques and collaborated with Gufram to design the seats for them. This eventually led to Gufram teaming up with the renowned Studio 65 to create a small number of furniture pieces that captured the spirit of the decade, including the lip-shaped “Bocca” sofa.

We Are Family

In 2011, the Vezza family purchased Gufram. Charley Vezza’s mother, Sandra, was a big Gufram fan who had collected the company’s designs for decades. Charley immediately created a team to research Gufram’s history and invited emerging designers to take advantage of its famous past and trailblazing accomplishments. He was concurrently conjuring up a furniture collection in his head, and when he spotted one of design duo Rotganzen’s deflated disco balls, the idea for a disco-themed furniture line was born.

Disco Inferno

With visions of Donna Summer dancing in his head, Vezza came upon a catalog of disco furniture from the 1980s in the Gufram annals. He was inspired by the collection and shared it with the designers over at Atelier Biagetti in Milan. An assortment of modular furniture in the catalog was particularly stimulating, as was the continuing success of famous 70s discothequess Baia Imperiale and Coccoricò. A new chapter in Italian design caught fire.

More, More, More

Gufram’s old catalog and Vezza’s passion for the project resulted in five new modular sofa designs. The new line includes an oversized velvet piece, a group of shimmering pouffes, a plaid and pink neon design, a gilded leather sectional couch, and a soft globule of sparkling lilac.
When the designers saw a particularly impressive floor covering at Centre Pompidou, they were awestruck. They learned that Gaëlle Gabillet and Stéphane Villard’s Paris-based design studio GGSV had created the design and soon commissioned them to craft a series of detailed dance floor-inspired rugs for the Gufram project. The designers explain that these unique rugs encourage dancers to position themselves in their centers and “do the freak.”

Good Times

Gufram’s highly-anticipated collection debuted during the 2017 Milan Design Week. The exhibit recalled the controversial and exciting time in the 1960s when the Radical Design movement ruled. Gufram is revitalizing the revelry of that era in 2018 with the assistance of three of the world’s most innovative designers: Atelier Biagetti (Italy), Rotganzen (Netherlands), and GGSV (France).

The post Get Down and Boogie with Gufram’s Disco-Themed Furniture Collection first appeared on Dornob.