Charles Stendig Dies at 99; Introduced Fanciful Furniture From Abroad

Charles Stendig, who launched modern and avant-garde European furnishings to adventurous People in his New York Metropolis showroom, died on Feb. 11 at his dwelling in Manhattan. He was 99.

His demise was introduced by R & Firm, a furnishings gallery in TriBeCa to which Mr. Stendig donated his design library and company archives.

There was a interval, starting within the Nineteen Sixties, when the American front room went cheerfully haywire, changing into a showcase for area age and Pop Artwork design. The long run had arrived, and it was plastic and improbable and brimming with optimism, mirroring the mod revolution in trend. Mr. Stendig had a hand in a lot of it, in search of out European producers, together with from Finland, within the days when cargo transport was low-cost.

Intrepid and gregarious, he was the primary and, for a time, the one American importer of the Finnish designer Eero Aarnio’s bubble furnishings, just like the Ball Chair, a cocoon-like plastic sphere upholstered on the within and sometimes accessorized with its personal phone. It had a cameo within the Nineteen Sixties British tv sequence “The Prisoner” in addition to in different dystopian classics.

On one mission, Mr. Stendig flew to Prague, which was then a part of the Soviet Bloc, to influence Thonet manufacturing unit executives to renew making the Nineteen Twenties-era bentwood and cane eating chairs that that they had stopped producing throughout World Warfare II; he needed to import these as properly. The catch was that he needed to assure the manufacturing prices for a yr, as he instructed Marisa Bartolucci, a design author who profiled him in 2016 for the antiques and fashionable furnishings web site 1stDibs, the place classic Stendig items now promote for 1000’s of {dollars}.

The chance was price it. For a time within the late Nineteen Sixties, the cane chairs, now avatars of contemporary design, appeared ubiquitous in sure American households.

Mr. Stendig additionally bought the elegant leather-based and chrome furnishings of Marcel Breuer, the Hungarian-German Bauhaus architect and designer, together with his Wassily Chair, named for the painter Wassily Kandinsky.

In Italy, he embraced the Radical Design motion led by mischievous Italian designers who poked enjoyable at consumerist tradition by making arch and ironic items, just like the Bocca, in any other case often known as the Marilyn couch, a brilliant crimson foam and jersey quantity within the form of a pair of lips. Mr. Stendig introduced it to his showroom, in Manhattan.

The Bocca was designed by the architect Franco Audrito for Studio 65, the design collective he co-founded, and made by Gufram, an organization identified for frolicsome foam items, like an agreeably goofy-looking cactus designed by Guido Drocco and Franco Mello. Mr. Stendig bought that one, too.

The Marilyn couch was an irresistible Pop Artwork icon, showing on journal covers and apparently scooped up by Hugh Hefner for the Playboy Mansion. But Mr. Stendig bought solely 4, as he instructed Evan Snyderman, a principal of R & Firm. Radical stylish didn’t come low-cost, even again then.

Mr. Stendig imported the wormlike Non-Cease Couch, an undulating leather-based creation with sections that zipped collectively, advert infinitum, designed by Eleonore Peduzzi-Riva, an Italian architect; its nine-inch sections price $155 in 1974 (about $1,000 in at this time’s foreign money).

Mr. Stendig was bullish on sectionals. Along with the Non-Cease Couch, he bought elements in stretch velour that match collectively in a half circle.

Then there was Joe, named for Joe DiMaggio, a love seat within the form of an enormous leather-based baseball glove, stitching included, with its fats fingers offering again help. When it made its American debut in Mr. Stendig’s showroom in 1970, it was priced at $1,500 (greater than $12,000 at this time) — not a simple promote, as he instructed The New York Occasions.

Joe — designed by a trio of Italian architects, Jonathan De Pas, Donato D’Urbino and Paolo Lomazzi — was included in a celebrated exhibition of Italian design in 1972 referred to as “The New Home Panorama” on the Museum of Trendy Artwork in New York.

However Mr. Stendig confirmed it first.

His enterprise was often known as “to the commerce,” which meant he bought to architects and designers, who would then promote the items to their shoppers. This association led by chance to one among fashionable design’s most enduring and coveted objects.

For a promotional giveaway for Christmas in 1966, Mr. Stendig requested Massimo Vignelli, the Italian designer of New York Metropolis’s subway map, amongst different graphic feats, to design a calendar. On the time, supergraphics — huge architectural components of kind and shapes — had been having a second. Mr. Vignelli had all the time needed to make an enormous calendar with numbers you possibly can see from throughout a studio flooring. What he got here up with was a easy grid, three toes by 4 toes, with the letters of the times of the week on the prime and the numbers in rows under, all rendered in pure black Helvetica kind on a white background and aligned flush left.

The calender was a virtually prompt design basic, and the Museum of Trendy Artwork acquired it for its everlasting assortment.

“Whenever you consider the custom of the promotional calendar, of half-naked women sitting on tractors hung up in gasoline stations throughout the nation,” Michael Bierut, former vice chairman of graphic design at Vignelli Associates, stated by cellphone, “what Massimo did was to base the intercourse enchantment of his calendar in how huge and delightful these numbers are. It’s nonetheless so contemporary. It’s virtually joyful.”

The calendar continues to be in manufacturing. (Mr. Bierut identified that the used sheets make nice modernist wrapping paper.)

Suzanne Slesin, a former design reporter for The Occasions and now editorial director of Pointed Leaf Press, which publishes design and artwork books, stated of Mr. Stendig: “He beloved fashionable furnishings, and he was having enjoyable, and it confirmed. And he was the one one exhibiting this wild and great modern furnishings. He was it.”

Charles William Stendig was born on Oct. 25, 1924, in Brooklyn, the one baby of Irving and Rose (Blum) Stendig. His father was an electrician. Charles served as a paratrooper throughout World Warfare II after which studied enterprise at New York College on the G.I. Invoice. He was a touring salesman of furnishings and tableware on the West Coast earlier than going into enterprise for himself in New York.

In a bar, over a beer, Mr. Stendig met a Finnish commerce consultant, who instructed him that his nation’s furnishings trade was booming and invited him to come back to Finland to take a look.

His go to, in a Finnair prop aircraft, took 26 hours and 4 refuels, as he instructed Ms. Bartolucci. The air terminal was a Quonset hut. However when he was taken to Lahti, Finland’s furniture-making capital, Mr. Stendig was gob-smacked by the pristine factories and the work he noticed, by designers like Mr. Aarnio, Ilmari Lappalainen and others.

The journey impressed him to enter enterprise on his personal. With a $300 mortgage from Paul Secon, a founding father of Pottery Barn, which on the time bought barely flawed ceramic “seconds” from a warehouse in Chelsea, Mr. Stendig opened a showroom in 1956 in a Midtown brownstone. That very same yr, he married Eleanore Brustein, and so they constructed the enterprise collectively, opening showrooms in Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Burlington Industries purchased the corporate in 1971, and the Stendigs stayed on as managers till 1976, when the corporate was purchased once more. The couple retired and turned to philanthropy, supporting, amongst different causes, the UJA-Federation of New York and sponsoring a scholarship program that introduced Scandinavian college students to review design within the U.S. referred to as “Because of Scandinavia.”

Ms. Stendig died in 2012. Mr. Stendig leaves no instant survivors.