Famous New York furniture designer Barlas Baylar is widely acclaimed for his minimalist works that integrate natural elements with modern aesthetics. To tour his Hudson Furniture showrooms is to walk through a world where nature has been reinterpreted by architecture, as if the 21st Century were pining for millennia past. Here the evolution of chandeliers, tables, bed frames and their headboards is on exhibit in the form of metal, wood, glass, and stone reworked for the furnishing of civilization. The soft curves of chain chandeliers are traced by metallic piping that lead to a descent of light through strands of glass. Expiring trees are memorialized in bittersweet majesty as the solid slabs of chairs and benches. Then there are those accessories which appear at once stone and wood – petrified wood, it turns out to be. Yet all these floor samples only start to suggest the bustle at Baylar’s prodigious workshop.
With personal experiences in production design and a family tradition in machinery manufacturing, Baylar founded Hudson Furniture to incorporate antique, all-natural materials, modernizing them with industrial details that make for transformative organic structures which suggest exteriors from their interior settings. For example, their surfaces are not simply sanded down but hand-burnished with broken glass to reveal nature’s own workmanship beneath.
Devotion to nature inspires not only Baylar’s designs but his whole way of working. Not merely some detached admirer from afar, he is deeply involved in the preservation of nature and only uses certifiably sustainable materials in his work. Nothing is to be wasted, with scraps and leftovers of every irregularity integrated into new works. In this way his geometric designs, traditional joinery techniques, and hand-rubbed oil finishes shall continue returning to nature, only to emerge once more in the form of the furnishings that clothe civilization.
