Showroom shakeup

How Gilbert Rohde, George Nelson, Charles and Ray Eames and Alexander Girard changed up the showroom to further understanding, spark experimentation and bring joy to the experience of shopping.

Written by: David Michon
Photos: Eames Office, LLC and Herman Miller Archives
Published: 26 September 2024

The Herman Miller San Francisco showroom, designed by Alexander Girard in 1958.

Principally, the exceptional showroom has two important capabilities: To produce in us – visitors, browsers, shoppers – some psychological response beyond simply a hungry desire to own; and, to help us break free of the insidious trap of following "what everyone else is doing," also known as trend. A skillfully executed showroom can, instead, relieve us of décor preconceptions and influence even the most risk averse among us to experiment – or if not experiment, then to at least consider something new.

A black and white composition photo of furniture in a 1939 showroom designed by Gilbert Rohde.

Gilbert Rohde's design for Herman Miller's first showroom in 1939 in Chicago had an organic sense of fluidity.

The cynics might say a good showroom is always and only, in service of selling. Yet, in the hands of the intrepid, these emporiums have the potential to help us re-see things we've taken for granted or not quite understood and in many cases even help us enjoy ourselves. Which is where we shall begin.

The words "crazy" and "fun" are not the first descriptors that typically come to mind in relation to a furniture showroom, yet in May 1961, they rolled off the tongue of Hugh De Pree. He would soon be president of Herman Miller and was praising the newly opened Textiles & Objects shop in Midtown Manhattan.

Alexander Girard, who'd been with Herman Miller since 1952 as founding director of its textiles programme, was entrusted to create what would be the brand's first retail store. In true Girardian fashion, it was a rhapsody of colour and pattern, with a clear prioritisation of "crazy and fun" over commerce. In the shop's windows, for example, was not a stoic Eames Lounge Chair or some other signature product, but a collection of very charming, handmade dolls, the work of Marilyn Neuhart of Los Angeles. They were just some of the many folk crafts lining the shelves at T&O, selected by Girard on his travels in the US, Turkey, Poland, Portugal and Italy.

A color photo of the 1958 Herman Miller San Francisco showroom, featuring two black chairs from Eames Aluminum Group and two upholstered Eames Shell chairs.

The carnivalesque San Francisco showroom featured vibrant colours and a folly for the Eames Aluminum Group, which launched in 1958, the year the showroom opened.

An archival photo of three colorful folk art dolls selected by Alexander Girard for the Textiles and Objects shop.

Handmade dolls were just some of the many folk crafts selected by Girard for the Textiles & Objects shop during his travels in the US, Turkey, Poland, Portugal and Italy.

Textiles & Objects proclaimed to stock fabrics and textile items, as well as "unusual and sympathetic decorative objects" (truly the most important kind). Layered upon one another, they defied "merchandised" isolation. Shelves populated with many different dolls, furniture upholstered in several colours a piece, fabric hanging from the ceiling as banners, all set against bright white walls and floors, which gave it the hum of an exhibition, not a strictly commercial venture.

An archival photo of Alexander Girard's brightly colored San Francisco showroom for Herman Miller.

Girard believed that merchandise was meant to be seen at all sorts of angles and to be played with – an unbuttoned approach for the times.

T&O brought people inside Girard's mind. And visitors caught up in the magic were exposed to a psychological purpose, via Girard's own philosophy that merchandise was meant to be seen at all sorts of angles, this way and that; to be played with. Imagine a chair, a pillow, a fabric at home not with formality but with crafts and dolls and memories. A very unbuttoned approach for a time when interior design was becoming more and more formalised.

It was not Girard's first playground. His 1958 contribution to the canon of "What the Trusted Designer Can Do" was the transformation of the crumbling Hippodrome Theatre in San Francisco into, of course, a Herman Miller showroom. The result was carnivalesque – bright, candy-coloured, with its central display modelled after a merry-go-round. So removed was it from any kind of sales logic that fellow Miller designer George Nelson reported that it "contains nothing, either as accessory or as a structure, that Herman Miller can sell." Still, not only did it delight De Pree for its sense of fun, it also garnered Herman Miller quite a lot of publicity.

Two black and white archival photos of the Herman Miller Los Angeles showroom, designed by Eames Office, featuring Eames Shell Chairs and an Elliptical Table.

Nelson had a more scholastic doctrine: Showroom spaces (and the work of the designer, in general) should help us all understand the modern world. With what he referred to as "an artist's awareness," he asked how the designer's gestures might not just "go along with things," but also make them comprehensible in new ways.

A color archival photo of George Nelson’s Chicago showroom for Herman Miller in 1949.

Pairing abstract shapes and the iconic Herman Miller "M," Nelson's Chicago showroom (1949) transformed the shopping experience into a journey.

The concept behind Nelson's 1947 New York City showroom for Herman Miller was to encourage visitors to drift through, thanks to particular arrangements and lighting – now standard practice. Take a journey, he commands; don't browse.

To accomplish this, he got low. The showroom in New York was his window on the world from a "mouse-eye view"; he gazed up – rather than down – at furniture. Nelson wrote about his approach in a 1957 essay. He observed a leg-world he termed the "subscape," in which he saw connections to modern skyscrapers, the doodles of Joan Miró, the columns of modern highways, the prehensile arms of Calder's mobiles. The move from wooden to metal legs was all part of the cultural momentum.

In the showroom, among the furniture, he placed large, imposing sculptures – in New York there was one by Nelson himself. (Other showrooms had Noguchi or Giacometti sculptures.) A very different take than Girard, but with a similar challenge to "product" logic, furniture pieces were treated as interrelated, social and inseparable from art and the monumental. You were not to just judge them aesthetically but asked to imagine a scene. (Perhaps a party; perhaps something more grandiose.)

A black and white archival photo of George Nelson's 1948 Herman Miller showroom in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Like Rohde before him, Nelson saw the showroom (including this 1948 Herman Miller showroom in Grand Rapids, Michigan) as a tool.

Nelson's showrooms – in New York, Grand Rapids and Chicago – call back to the company's very first, a 1939 showroom in Chicago, designed by Gilbert Rohde, a man who very much helped establish Herman Miller as a modern furniture magic-maker. And for Rohde (like Girard and Nelson after him), the showroom was a tool. In Chicago, the straight, modern lines of Herman Miller furniture were offset by amoeba-shaped cutouts and soffits and curved or perforated walls. Subtle, perhaps, but it enshrined a sense of fluidity and change and the sexy delight of the glimpse as you catch something through an aperture. What is more relatable, more enticing than the gradual reveal?

There are reasons why these environments have left an impression and why it's with fondness and even a little nostalgic envy we remember them. For, in a world in which we are increasingly obsessed with the formulae of content and the slippery science of selling, to be allowed to wander through the mind or laboratory, of a thoughtful designer – concerned about us and about society above and sometimes instead of a bottom line – is quite rare.

A black and white archival photo of Gilbert Rohde’s 1939 Herman Miller Chicago showroom, as seen through a biomorphic-shaped opening.

Rohde's 1939 Herman Miller Chicago showroom delighted in a casual reveal.

A black and white archival photo featuring the steel-frame structure of Herman Miller’s Los Angeles showroom.

The steel-frame structure of Herman Miller's Los Angeles showroom riffs on Charles and Ray Eames's Pacific Palisades home.

Novelty, too, is totally misinterpreted today – more often used as a smoke screen, not a lens. And so: Here's to the showrooms that not only sold to us, but also managed to sell us a new vision of the world around us. More than ever, perhaps, we should expect these physical spaces to do some heavy lifting and shake us up, as so much of our digital lives feels like a rinse and repeat.