Herbert Reisner has a vineyard in Austria that he tends with scissors. When he`s done snipping, the vines are naked save for one or two clusters of grapes. Those grapes, Reisner says, get all the sunshine and all the nutrients, too.
The resulting wine, labeled with 24-karat-gold lettering, costs $700 a bottle. But you cannot buy this wine in stores. No, you must demonstrate an appreciation for 25-year-old Herbert Reisner`s philosophy of life, which he has invented a name for: Herbasmus.
Then, perhaps, he will sell you a bottle.
”There is more heart in my wine,” Reisner explains, ”because I do it with my whole being.”
This is no way to run a prosperous vineyard, but Reisner isn`t after prosperity. He`s already rich. He inherited his father`s booming business in Kirchschlag, Austria-about an hour`s drive from Vienna-at age 18, and now he presides over a large furniture store, a smaller satellite store and a manufacturing plant, all inherited.
But Reisner is an oddity in the furniture industry, a business dominated by gray-suited businessmen and huge companies that take few risks.
It`s not just his youth that makes him different, or his vineyard, or his black-on-black striped suit with the Herbasmus label stitched inside.
(Herbasmus?) Imagine a cross between Michael Jackson and Peter Pan: Out springs a manchild of the you-can-fly-if-you-believe- you-can variety-or, more precisely, a young furniture executive who is hypercreative, arrogant, brilliant, rich and a little naive.
This spring, Reisner came to the Southern Furniture Market in High Point, N.C., to market a chair he designed-an elegant white leather affair in the Austrian Art Deco style.
Its armrests open like lids. Under the armrests are a bottle of champagne, two champagne flutes, a tiny halogen reading light and a diminutive tape deck. There`s room for a phone and a small CD player. Hey, for a price, they`ll squeeze in anything you want.
Two spring-driven drawers dart out in front. For storing tapes.
”You have to have an imagination to sell this chair,” says Ann Paulson, who works for the chair`s United States rep, a Chicago consultant named Konrad Landauer, ”and to buy it.” No wonder. The chair has the beer-and-pretzels name of Couch Potato, though it belongs to a series of pieces-loveseats and the like-called Vienna 1900.
It costs $6,000 without a single option.
Because the creative force behind this chair is Herbasmus, each Couch Potato has a 24-karat-gold H on the front, just about 1 inch high.
Reisner gave two of these H`s to his High Point publicist, Martha Mitchell. Mitchell asked a jeweler to turn them into earrings. They were appraised, she says, at $1,000.
”You are born to do it, or you are not born to do it,” Reisner says breezily. He means managing a big company, but he talks this way this about everything he has done.
He founded the philosophy of his life at the age of 16. ”Herbasmus means you should do what you think, and do it the easiest way you can,” he says.
”If you`re not able to do it-just leave it. But everything you want to express with your life, you should.”
Translation: Go for it.
He produced a record, with proceeds (if there are any; he doesn`t know yet)to go for the care of AIDS patients. ”It`s Herbasmus music,” Reisner says. His favorite song on the album, ”Gin, Whiskey and Beer,” was banned from the Austrian airwaves as promoting drinking, Reisner says. The fact that he rasps ”Don`t drink and drive” in the middle of the song-after a long chant of ”Beer, beaujolais, Bacardi, Hennessy, Herbasmus, bordeaux, gin . . . ”-apparently failed to cheer up the censors.
He sang his Herbasmus music before an audience of 40,000 in Austria, he says, for the same cause.
He decorated his 4,000-square-foot home in Kirchschlag by himself; it took 367 hours. He counted. The kitchen is red and gold, with Chinese paintings on the cabinets. The bedroom has a realistic seascape on the ceiling-he painted it himself-and four different walls: one mirrored, one draped, one dotted with geometric figures, one splashed with paint.
He made the wine he calls Herbasmus.
24-KARAT NECKTIE
He created a 24-karat-gold necktie with a snaggle-toothed edge; it hangs around his neck from a gold chain. Between appearances, he hides it. ”Don`t ask me where,” he warns. ”Maybe the moon.” It shows up in a brochure for his chair, a glittering and unfamiliar object.
He designed his own $70,000 14-karat-gold and platinum watch with
”Herbasmus” etched on the face. This took a long time to produce, actually, as only a watchmaker sympatico to Herbasmus could do the job.
He wrote a book under his desk in high school, albeit a short and personal book that he published himself, titled . . . well, you know.
”You can`t get the experience in a school,” he says of all this, and indeed, he didn`t. After high school, which he remembers as one drawn-out dispute with his philosophy teacher, Reisner quit. Today he shuns books,
”because maybe I would be influenced by some idea. I make my own ideas.”
Reisner wasn`t in High Point just to sell his chair. He came to buy American furniture, handsome though not too expensive, which he rolled out in his store at the end of May for Kirchschlag`s American Holidays celebration.
Now, Kirchschlag didn`t invent its American Holidays, even though its policemen all wore Western sheriffs` badges and 200 American flags flew over its streets. (While they lasted. After two days, most were stolen. ”You wouldn`t believe how people went for those flags,” Landauer says.) No, Reisner came up with this citywide extravaganza to promote his new shipment of American furniture.
For two weeks, his store, Mobel Reisner, served ham and egg breakfasts, popcorn or other American foodstuffs every day. His 22 salespeople wore Western hats and Western belts with (real) gold on the buckles.
A CUSTOM AUTOMOBILE
Customers were shuttled to and from their homes in a $60,000 limousine, which Konrad Landauer, Reisner`s representative in the U.S., recently ordered from Moloney Coachbuilders in Chicago. (The Herbasmus logo is woven into the floor mats.)
Finally, the three best restaurants in Kirchschlag cooked up American menus. One set up a Western bar, complete with a player piano and the rear end of an old covered wagon.
Landauer tracked most of this stuff down, but Reisner paid for it, right down to the flags and the stars. Total cost: about $20,000, Landauer says, but he adds: ”He sold a lot of furniture.”
Reisner`s eyes are wide and ceramic blue; his hair, feathered and blond. He could have waltzed out of ”The Sound of Music,” were he not smoking a Marlboro with one hand and holding a flute of fizzing champagne in the other. His wife, Nicole, 22, is opening a clothing boutique in Kirchschlag, he says. They have a 1-year-old son, Daniel.
A visitor asks if anything ever frightens him. Sometimes, Reisner says, his psychic abilities are terrifying. They began suddenly, when he founded Herbasmus. Three days before losing his father in an automobile crash, he had a premonition of the accident, he says.
He is less certain about who his friends are, doesn`t mention his wife. Doesn`t mention anyone. ”I don`t believe everyone has friends,” he says.
”Everyone is his own best friend. I don`t care about friends too much.”
Landauer says: ”He`s alone on Herbasmus, but then I guess he has to be. You look back on all the great people in history, they usually didn`t associate themselves with other people.”
Great?
Landauer says: ”Look, you could do drugs, and there would be no benefit. There`s benefit to Herbasmus. You could spend your money on things that make a lot less sense.”
Konrad Landauer is president of Trans-Global Trading and Consulting Inc. He consults for more than 20 American and European companies. Herbasmus-that is, young Herbert Reisner-is one of his smallest projects, he says.
But it intrigues him. No other job sends him scouring Chicago for player pianos.
”I have been known to do unusual things,” Landauer says in a dry voice, ”but this is borderline.”
Reisner`s Couch Potato, meanwhile, attracted a fair amount of attention at the Southern Furniture Market. It caught the eye of Barbara Kelly, a Chicago interior designer. Kelly mulled it over, backed off; too expensive. Then it caught the eye of Howard Polk, whose new Polk Bros. store opens later this year in Melrose Park. Polk backed off, too. The thing costs a fortune.
But Herbasmus doesn`t always come cheap. –
