fohh presents lively talk on design geniuses russel and mary wright

Albrecht: he’s smilier in person.

If, like me, your eyes tend to glaze over when you hear the words “dinnerware set”, you might have been tempted to skip the Friends of Hollin Hills talk last Saturday about modern design couple Russel and Mary Wright, and go do something exciting, like pluck lint off your sweaters.

But as it turned out, the March 22 “virtual chat” with Donald Albrecht — the knowledgable and engaging former Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of the City of New York — was a fascinating introduction to this design power couple, who brought modernism to the masses in the decades before World War II (largely, in fact, via … dinnerware), and lived, by the sound of it, an exhaustingly creative life.

Albrecht walked his audience (several dozen Hillers and a few strays) through the tale of how the Wrights became the first midcentury “lifestyle marketers”, with Russel designing stylish and distinctly modern housewares (the ubiquitous dinnerware, plus textiles, furniture and so on), while Mary handled the marketing end of the family business.

Russel Wright in his studio

Mary — who, oddly enough, was related to Albert Einstein — turned out to be a genius in her own right. She talked Macy’s into showcasing Russel’s work, convinced middle class Americans that they needed to bring their houseware game up to date, and brought the couple to huge commercial success — their “American Modern” ceramic dinnerware, for instance, became the most widely sold in history.

That celebrity-level popularity, said Albrecht, turned the Wrights into the “Martha Stewart” of their day, and helped set the tone of midcentury style. And whether you care for the Wrights’ products or not — and de gustibus non est disputandum — it was hard not to be impressed with their wonderfully imaginative designs, which often combined natural materials like cork and leaves with man-made materials such as spun aluminum.

Albrecht told the story well, but — perhaps knowing his Hollin Hills audience — he soon switched to the extraordinary and ultra-modern house that the Wrights designed and built in upstate New York, called Manitoga. With its open interiors, flat roof, and floor-to-ceiling windows, the house’s similarity to our own beloved architecture was striking (he even put slides of Manitoga and a Hollin Hills home side by side, where they looked like twins), and many of us stopped with the lint-picking and started to pay real attention.

For it was here, in his own home (Mary, sadly, had passed away by the time the house was built), that Russel’s creativity really took wing. Albrecht seemed fascinated with what he called Wright’s “eccentricity” — the word came up often, and appropriately — but it was hard not to be impressed with the designer’s relentlessly innovative brain.

Forget the pleasant-enough crockery he sold to the masses — in his own home, Wright was conducting design experiments that ranged from the sublime (real butterflies, encased in a window!) to the awkward (real toilet paper rolls, encased in a window!), but — like the immense, moss-covered boulder placed in the middle of the driveway — were never less than provocative.

And in one of those eccentric touches we expect from our geniuses, Wright turned out to be a perfectionist of the first order. The designer — who with his wife once wrote a book titled “A Guide to Easier Living” — must have been a nightmare to live with. Nothing was “easy” with him: he changed the house’s entire furnishings (including curtains, lighting, artwork and even cabinet colors) from summer to winter every year, a process that took several very annoying days. And get this: his housekeeper had to make sure the color of his food went with the particular dinnerware he would be using. (As someone with a touch of OCD myself at times, I admit to being deeply impressed.)

At any rate, Albrecht’s talk provided a compelling look into the mind of an undisputed design genius, and probably whetted the appetites of many of us to jump in the car and check out Wright’s Manitoga home. It’s a museum now, and open to the public — learn more at the Manitoga website.

Many thanks to Albrecht — and Friends! — for this fascinating and thought-provoking talk.

— Stephen Brookes