March 24, 2024To Lauren Rottet, there is nothing sadder than a piece of furniture that no one notices.
“Sometimes, people will plop themselves in a chair without even looking at it or thinking about it,” says Rottet (pronounced row-TAY), an architect who does interior design and believes that furnishings should be as compelling as the art hanging on the walls. “If you just have a bunch of furniture that no one ever looks at or thinks about, have you really been artful? Have you been creative?”
The furniture that Rottet designs is both, although it usually operates at a whisper rather than a shout, forgoing brash colors or patterns in favor of rich materials and a discreet palette. “If you really study the pieces, they’re very detailed,” says the Houston-based designer, whose Rottet Collection is available on 1stDibs. “They have a lot of stuff going on, but they’re not one-liners. You don’t look at them and go, ‘Oh, wow,’ then never glance at them again. You see more and more every time you look.”
Contemporary in style and inspired by art (Rottet cites both kinetic art and the Light and Space movement as influences), her tables and seating often incorporate transparent materials or faceted surfaces that refract light in different ways throughout the day or when viewed from different perspectives. “As you move past a piece, it changes the way you perceive it,” Rottet says. “That’s what I mean by ‘kinetic’ — it has visual movement.”
In pieces like Rottet’s Structured dining chair and Bosco lounge chair, the hardwood frames don’t just support the seats, they embrace them. “The exterior is very durable and solid — like a cradle’s — but what goes inside it can be very plush and comfortable,” she says. “It’s an architectural concept.”
Rottet comes by the architectural allusions honestly, having earned a degree in the field from the University of Texas at Austin in 1979, when few women were entering the profession. Working for the Houston office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, she supervised the design of three high-rises before turning 30. When the building bubble burst, she drifted into interiors, overseeing a couple of decorating projects for SOM. The firm was so impressed with the results it asked Rottet to head up its new interiors department in Los Angeles. She packed up her belongings and headed to the coast.
It was there, some 34 years ago, that she began creating furniture. “The first piece I designed was a sofa for myself, because I couldn’t find one that fit my house,” she recalls. “I had a party one night, and everyone was like, ‘This is so beautiful! Whose is it?’ ” Caught off guard, Rottet stammered, “Well . . . it’s mine. I did it.”
In a coincidence worthy of a Hollywood screenplay, a furniture company representative happened to be in attendance and told Rottet he would have no trouble selling a piece like that. She licensed the sofa to his firm, Brayton International (later renamed Coalesse), where it remained in production for the next 30 years.
There are now 64 pieces in the designer’s own collection. Some are riffs on items she’s created for clients, such as the new line of beds she launched after getting calls from hotels she’s designed saying that guests wanted to buy the beds in their rooms. More often, however, they’re original. “Usually, it’s something that I want to exist but cannot find,” Rottet says. “So, I just create it.”
Her Wood Float lounge chair is one such piece. It features a walnut frame fitted with a clear acrylic seat and back that almost dare users to make themselves comfortable. “I have never shown someone that chair when the first question wasn’t ‘Can I sit in it’?” Rottet says with bemusement. “Of course, you can sit in it. It’s very durable.”
In Rottet’s hands, tables and seating often levitate atop transparent or reflective bases that diminish their mass. “I love things to feel like they’re hovering,” she says, acknowledging that this is another tactic borrowed from her architectural practice. She reserves most of her showier gestures for smaller pieces, like the Dichroic table, which resembles a Cubist rainbow, and the Dark and Stormy resin side table, whose colored core appears to mutate as you move past it.
“At the end of the day, most of my clients want a sofa that’s relatively normal, because it’s a big investment,” Rottet says. “However, they’ll buy an end table or coffee table or lounge chair that’s crazy, because what’s the commitment? Not that much.”
The first woman to ever be made a fellow of both the American Institute of Architects and the International Interior Design Association, Rottet mostly focuses on interiors these days and is starting to expand into landscape design. She divides her time among offices in Houston, Los Angeles and New York City, where she maintains a penthouse pied-à-terre outfitted with furniture from her collection.
When she’s not tending to business in Manhattan, Rottet retreats to her home in the Hamptons, built in the late 1980s from a 1962 design by George Nelson, or her Beverly Hills rental, built by Greta Magnusson-Grossman. Both Nelson and Magnusson-Grossman were pioneering modernist architects who, not coincidentally, also designed home furnishings. Like those trailblazers, Rottet isn’t afraid to produce work that challenges expectations. “If half the people absolutely love it and half the people absolutely hate it,” she says with a laugh, “I know I’m successful.”
