Modern Man

Spartanburg-based furniture designer Benjamin Rollins Caldwell transforms the everyday into the ethereal, one found object at a time

Spartanburg-based furniture designer Benjamin Rollins Caldwell transforms the everyday into the ethereal, one found object at a time

Although he’s not a musician, Benjamin Rollins Caldwell will tell you that he’s been collecting pianos since December. Pianos. “I’m up to at least 50 or 60,” he says. The pianos are procured from thrift stores for $35 to $75 and will be gutted and repurposed in his work as “a maker of objects,” which is how Caldwell describes what it is that he does as a designer of high-end, handmade, artistically sophisticated furniture.

Caldwell, however, might have more in common with a hunter scoping a 12-point buck in the field, than with some too-cool-for-school artiste among the highfalutin’ elite: He maintains laser focus, keeps tenacious determination, and, most importantly, trusts his instincts. Except instead of tracking deer, gathering thrift-store finds is Caldwell’s sport; designing handcrafted furniture is his skill—juxtaposing them both in inspired compositions is his passion. And he, too, could mount his most recent trophy on the wall if he wants—it’s the latest issue of Guitar Aficionado, for which the cover shot is actor Richard Gere sitting in a chair of Ben’s creation.

“Modern eclectic” is how Caldwell describes his style of studio, handcrafted furniture, into which he incorporates everyday elements such as PVC pipes, concrete, copper, steel, piano keys, and anything else he can gather, in unconventional, sparse, and absolutely stunning ways. He graduated with a degree in fine art and business from Westmont College, a small, liberal-arts school in Santa Barbara, California, and was making furniture for his submission to apply to graduate school at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design, when it struck him: Why don’t I just start designing now? So that, quite presciently, is what he did—forgoing grad school and launching his company, BRC Designs, in January 2009 instead.

Before BRC Designs, Caldwell had been part of the family business. The Grace Management Group, based in Spartanburg, runs four businesses, among them the high-end Votivo candle line (Madonna and Oprah are fans), for which Caldwell, 27, was the brand manager. It was a creative job, but not creative enough, and frustrated by the limitations and lack of “hands-on design,” he left the company, endeavoring instead on a project for which he could exercise full artistic control—and one which would help propel his future as a furniture designer squarely into his present: He bought a house and took on a nearly three-year-long renovation. “It was gutted down to the studs,” Caldwell says. He put in maple floors (their first incarnation was as the flooring of old, local cotton mills, including Laurens County Mill and Buffalo Mill). “The places that you see the dark wood is where it had been sitting directly under the cotton machine. It’s been sitting in oil for a hundred years.” From there, he began to fill the rest of the space with his own furniture as well as finds he ferrets out during his weekly thrift and antique store visits. He’s good at it, too, picking up a cast-off Philippe Starck table from a Salvation Army in Spartanburg for $75 (original value, between $3,000 and $5,000).

He is an aberration for the town of Inman, South Carolina, certainly, and the Lake Bowen community where he lives, what with its signs for BBQ joints, ramshackle churches, and rusted-out pickups. Dressed like the lead singer of an indie rock band, yet completely lacking the artifice and pretense, Caldwell greets with a welcoming smile, attired in fitted white jeans, a black shirt with white suspenders, and a tie the color of a ruby. His house and its appointments are equally as hip. Placemats made of chainmail (the material originally intended for use as his bedroom curtains) shimmy to the touch on the downstairs table. A small section of the downstairs bathroom floor is actually a bed of smooth river stones, and a discarded Louis Vuitton–style steamer trunk that Caldwell found at a thrift store has been craftily repurposed as the bathroom storage for toiletries and cleaning supplies. This is a house for the senses, and it’s evident that Caldwell’s are especially acute.

A tour through his nearly 3,000-square-foot home reveals as much about the designer himself as it does his design aesthetic: Lines are clean, the black-lacquer closet doors as glossy as the top of a Steinway. His love of combining disparate elements is apparent, but not obvious. His grandmother’s silver tea-service set, for example, shares the space next to two headless busts on top of a weathered hutch saved from an old mill before it went to the dump. Hanging on the wall above are two paintings of clowns, in all their Technicolor (and slightly creepy) glory. He is a scavenger and an arranger. A Willy Wonka meets the Mad Hatter of the handicraft-design realm, picking and choosing what fits his fancy for the most impact.

His designs have long been percolating. His conscious and subconscious seem to collude in the most beneficent of ways, even if sleepless nights plague, yet ultimately provide for him. Designs finally coming into being now, he’ll tell you, have usually been turning over in his mind for six months prior. He is self-taught and unlike most designers who use the computer-aided design program, CAD, or put everything down on paper, Caldwell’s process is to think it, then do it—no CAD, no paper, no problem.

His studio is in Spartanburg, about fifteen minutes from his home, but depending on the week, one can often find him in cosmopolitan places far from Inman. He’s shown his work at the Dwell on Design show in Los Angeles, debuted his modern, studio-built designs at the Maison & Objet show in Paris last year, and attended the International Contemporary Furniture Fair, a who’s who of design, last May in New York.

A coffee table designed entirely of computer parts (minus the screws) for his Binary Collection was bought within the first fifteen minutes of the show by a Connecticut-based architect, who, it turns out, lives in one of the Rockefellers’ previous homes and thought Caldwell’s chair would be perfect for the lobby of a new resort hotel he is working on in South America.

Caldwell spent time in August in Accra, Ghana, to apprentice under Eric Adjetey Anang of the Kane Kwei Carpentry Workshop, which was established in the 1950s, to learn the art of making elaborate “design coffins.” A week after he arrived, he received word that five pieces of his furniture had been chosen for the green room at the Emmy Awards in Los Angeles on September 18. Not a bad way to wrap up the summer.

His furniture, Caldwell says, is not meant to be seen as “art,” adding that the fine-art world considers anything functional not to be fine art, though his designs are as beautiful as anything you might call that. It is fashionable functionality—a signature of his design style.

The innovation is in the deceptive utilitarianism of the pieces. His Deuces Wild Chair, for example, is a glorious reinterpretation of what a chair—by most conventional definitions—should be made out of. His is constructed from 350 decks of retired playing cards from casinos in Las Vegas that have been painstakingly hole-punched by hand and strung onto steel rods. One chair takes about a week and a half to make. The allure to sit down in it is strong, but will the chair crumble like a gambler who can’t break his losing streak? “Go for it,” he insists to his guest. “Seriously, go for it.” Totally solid, and sit-worthy—and as cool as the mini-bar inside a room at the Bellagio.
This is high-brow furniture, geared toward a particular clientele, but which has a sense of humor. Case in point: the Slinky Table, a spiral of welded steel which bobs up and down, challenges not only your martini glass, but also your idea of what a table is and what it should be. “You have to sort of switch your mindset as to what is functional,” Caldwell explains. “It’s not made for your entire encyclopedia set,” he says. “That’s why I like this piece, because it not only forces me to be creative in thinking up how to make it, but it forces the viewer to be creative in what the use of it is.”

For now, the goal, in practical terms, is for Caldwell to get picked up by a gallery and acquire representation so he can sell his pieces. It’s in assembling the impractical, however, that Caldwell has found the most joy. What else would explain the mountain of denim made up of the thousands of pairs of jeans that lay piled in his usually spotless home—for which he is taking the leather labels off the pockets and nailing them together to make the covering for the top of a table in his Label Whore Collection—those gutted pianos he’s using for his Korobeiniki Collection, the growing arsenal of hard-drive disks, LED screens, and other parts from obsolete computers that he uses for his Binary Collection, or his quest for as many hardback books for his next collection he’s calling Chapter 11 (a clever play on words given Borders’ recent demise) made entirely from book covers. Caldwell’s work shows that in design, like love, it’s often what seems the most impractical that makes it so special.