This fall, one of the newest items in Barry Bursak`s avant-garde store City-known for the dark, sophisticated furniture it imports from Milan-will be an ordinary white plate, restaurant-thick and banded with green, the kind you might find in a highway diner.
What you won`t see are the stark, stylized Italian halogen lights, priced high in the three figures, that City always has stocked. Replacing them are simple metal lamps in black and gray, designed in the 1940s and selling for less than $100.
”Prices have gotten so out of hand,” Bursak says. ”Someone comes in and says, `I need a lamp for my desk.` I say, `This one is $500, this one is $700, this one is $800.` And the guy says, `I just want a lamp for my desk.`
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It`s a strange revelation from this man who used to dwell on a design`s importance, not its practicality or cost; who made an international reputation by staking his money on Italy`s hottest new products. Maison Francais, a top French magazine, billed City as ”Chicago`s premier design store.” And Dorothy Kalins, editor of Metropolitan Home, says of Bursak: ”Barry`s like an artist-retailer; he`s breaking new ground. His furnishings are really the leading edge of design in the world. And because he`s so passionate about what he does, he encourages the consumer to connect with shapes and materials that certainly weren`t in his mother`s living room.”
Nevertheless, on Sept. 30 Bursak is opening a new City at a new site, minus the outrageous and expensive designs that built up its fame.
What won`t change: the black-and-gray minimalist look that now defines City`s furniture and clothes. If anything it will be more pervasive because the new space, a second-story loft at 361 W. Chestnut St., is twice the size of the present store at 213 W. Institute Pl. (where much of the merchandise is now on sale).
”What I`m doing now, I`m pulling back from the stuff that`s gone too far,” Bursak says. ”We`ll get back to some very basic products.”
At 42, Bursak is blunt with his opinions and deadpan-funny. He is affectionate with people he likes, scornful toward people he
doesn`t-especially competitors. And he is a passionate cook.
Black is his milieu. ”Wear something colorful,” he was prompted for a photography session. ”How about a dark blue suit?” he said wryly.
”Everything else I have is black.” But he arrived in a brief blaze of color, behind the wheel of a red two-seater Alfa Romeo.
At home he eats off the restaurant plates that City is soon to carry, but as a relief from the long days in the store, he lives with very little furniture. So when a newspaper photographer showed up several years ago to do a spread, Bursak raided his store in the morning, furnished the place fast and brought the furniture back that night.
HOW IT STARTED
What got him into retailing in the first place, he says, were migraine headaches-vicious ones that began when he was a young man in Wisconsin, working on degrees in religion and philosophy. For six years they were unrelenting. ”Try coffee,” suggested one physician, thinking the caffeine would help.
So Bursak tried coffee. It tasted horrible. And he founded Good Earth, a coffee, tea and spice company that sold to Crate & Barrel and other specialty stores.
That was the end of the migraines, although Bursak thinks it had more to do with leaving school than drinking coffee. After three years he sold his coffee company to his supplier. Then he moved to Chicago and opened Granfalloon.
Granfalloon was a high-tech furniture store, but no one caught on until design writer Suzanne Slesin came out with her famous book ”High-Tech.”
Suddenly, Bursak says, shoppers were strolling in and saying, ”Oh, I get it.”
One of the people who strolled in and got it was June Blaker, who came in for a shower curtain, chatted with Bursak and walked out with a date. They were still dating when Bursak closed Granfalloon, with its pastel colors and foam sofas, and opened the sleek, dark City. Today the two share a home and a business; she is City`s vice president and manages its clothing line.
”The idea was to have a whole lifestyle store; so we had clothing that was sympatico with the furniture: architectural and minimal,” says Blaker, who has a background in retail buying and art. ”The Japanese were really emerging on the fashion scene; so I went to Japan and started with somewhat unknown designers-unknown here, that is, not in Japan. That started to get us a reputation.”
To be sure, while both the clothing and furniture were gray and black, no one at City really talked about ”basics” until now. For example, in 1983 City became one of the first and few American stores to stock the untamed Memphis pieces from Italy-from weird $1,000 glass vases to multicolored bookshelves that cost more than $10,000.
”It was necessary to show what was being done,” says Bursak, who dropped the line after several years. ”Memphis was the only movement of its kind going on in this decade.”
”We struggled a lot over Memphis: Should we or shouldn`t we?” Blaker adds. ”And we did it not to make money”-they didn`t-”but because it was significant.”
Some shoppers were turned off by this purist streak, but City began turning up in national design magazines as Chicago`s retail source for radical home furnishings.
Now that the dollar buys less overseas than it did two and three years ago, Bursak is dropping many of the Italian, Dutch, French and other imports that cost so much no one buys them anymore. Instead he plans to sell more classic designs from the 1930s, `40s and `50s; more high-style tabletop objects; and more moderately priced, American-made furnishings.
COMING UP
New to City this fall: Sasaki plates designed by Andree Putman, priced at about $60 to $80 for a five-piece place setting. Also new: more of the delicate and classic paper lamps by Isamu Noguchi, about $75 to $300. Out:
Eileen Gray`s 1920s shirt cabinet with drawers that swing out sideways, selling for $3,000.
City also will carry American-made sofas under its own label, their lines borrowed from the 1930s and `40s and their wool fabrics brought back from old car-seat upholstery. But it will ignore the new flatware by Ettore Sottsass, the Italian designer and Memphis patriarch whose name carries so much weight in some circles that such indifference would be tantamount to heresy.
”You can buy American-made restaurant ware that looks exactly the same,” Bursak says. ”But design has gone to the point where people are producing stuff because it has someone`s name on it, whether it`s good or bad. People are looking at names in home furnishings the way they once looked at names on designer jeans.”
Bursak is moving to a new site not just for more space but to have a new restaurant by his side. He now subleases space to Monique`s Cafe, but last winter he locked the glass doors connecting the two, citing irreconcilable differences in style: Monique`s is light and airy and serves pate and quiche; City, sleek and startling, sells everything in black and gray.
”We have a lot of conservative clientele who don`t go for that high-tech look,” says restaurant owner Monique Hooker. ”But I feel a lot of his clients were our clients, and when he closed the door there were a lot of negative reactions to it.”
Now City is courting a well-known Chicago chef-Bursak is not yet naming names-to start a regional Italian restaurant in part of the new 26,000-square- foot loft.
City`s clothing department will drop some of the new but little-known designers Blaker discovered in Japan, again because rising import prices make these labels hard to sell. Replacing them are several top Japanese labels, including Yohji Yamamoto and Matsuda. New: Italian-made wool and cashmere clothes by designer Ronaldus Shamask. Staying on: the Hino & Malee line.
Most of the new clothing, like most of the new furnishings, will be black.
In the end, Chicago seems to be divided into two camps over this store, and that`s not likely to change. There`s the tiny minority that wants its furniture dark and stark and does not mind paying for the restraint. And there`s everyone else. ”We deal with the fringe here,” Bursak says. ”These are not mass-marketed products. We see a very limited interest in them. And I don`t think it`s growing in America.”
Bursak, on the other hand, is content in Chicago. ”There are still people who walk in the store and think we just opened,” he says. ”They look around and say, `This is a beautiful store, but it`ll never work here.` And I`ve had people telling me this for 10 years-that I`ve got a lot of style, but Chicago isn`t the place for me.
”Well, I`ve been doing business here for 10 years. Chicago has supported me.” –
