You may not know the name, but you may know the look. If the linen on your bed, the gift-wrap in your closet or the fabric on your sofa features a floral motif, delicate yet so full of robust brushstrokes it seems almost freshly painted, there’s a good chance the design is by Laurette Angsten.
If it is, the original design took shape on a canvas painted by the prolific artist who mixed her first colors at Saints Faith, Hope and Charity elementary school in Winnetka, and forged the link between her imagination and her palette at New Trier West High School in Northfield.
Her name may be unknown to most shoppers, but Angsten, the artistic force behind 8-year-old Laurette Design Inc., is becoming a designer to be reckoned with in the highly competitive home furnishings and decorative home products industries.
She recently won a 1994 Tommy Award, the American Printed Fabrics Council’s equivalent of an Oscar, for her Bermuda collection of breezy, sherbet-toned designs for Bloomcraft, a major fabric firm in New York.
From paper goods and fabric-covered picture frames to draperies and wallpaper, Angsten’s patterns appear on hundreds of products, generating more than $20 million annually for firms like Bloomcraft that license her designs.
Sitting at a broad, country-style table in the airy Manhattan design studio she shares with her filmmaker husband, Kit Kittle, Angsten smiles and shrugs. “I sell a lot of designs, but no one knows my name.”
Name recognition
Angsten, the marketer, is working to build the name Laurette, the artist, into one as familiar as those of the fashion designers who have expanded into the lucrative home-furnishings field.
Unlike Bill Blass, Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren and a long list of others who parlayed fame on the runways into success in the bed and bath departments, Angsten is pursuing recognition from a different direction.
It’s tough to develop name recognition in this way, but it can be done, as the late home furnishings queen Laura Ashley demonstrated. Next year the New York-based bed linen manufacturer Croscill Inc. will begin marketing bed ensembles with the Laurette name.
At 40, the Evanston-born Angsten has time. The athletic mother of two sons under 5 years old has the energetic personality of a younger Martha Stewart.
Like Stewart, Angsten, some of whose designs are featured in the Spiegel catalog and at Pier 1 Imports, J.C. Penney and Ethan Allen stores, has concentrated on moderately priced home furnishings. As such, she is well-positioned for growth in a time when her potential customers seem less impressed with designer names than with quality and value.
“My customer is a woman who is juggling a lot and doesn’t have a lot of time. This (her merchandise) is a designer look at a really moderate price,” Angsten says. One of her most popular bed ensemble patterns, a butter yellow, periwinkle and spring green design of lush peonies and wavy stripes called Fiesta for Croscill, is about $40 for a set of cotton/polyester blend twin sheets to about $190 for a king-size polyester-filled comforter.
Her bed and bath ensembles typically include pillow shams, bed skirts, toss pillows, curtains, valances, lampshades and table linens.
“Her look is a very distinctive look, for lack of a better word, transitional-between traditional and contemporary,” says Harold Tooter, president of Bloomcraft, which licenses Laurette fabrics to more than 20 manufacturers of furniture and decorative home accessories.
The Fiesta collection of bed linens and accessories has been one of Croscill’s top five lines for the last two years, says David Kahn, the firm’s president, noting the collection generates between $15 million and $20 million at retail annually. Like everything Angsten designs, the sheet patterns are conceived to coordinate with home furnishing fabrics and wallcoverings.
Angsten takes the same ensemble approach to her paper goods collections for Beach Products’ Contempo and Renner-Davis divisions, where her designs have consistently been best sellers. For Beach, Angsten provides four collections a year for some 500 products, ranging from gift-wrap and stationery to paper plates, napkins and fabric-covered accessories, such as albums and diaries.
Her newest venture, wallcoverings, made its debut last fall with a collection called At Home on Martha’s Vineyard, for York, Pa.-based York. A melange of soft but vivid tones of rose, yellow, green and blue, the wallcoverings feature coordinating paper and fabric florals, plaids and stripes in various complementary scales.
An early start
The common element in all her collections is color-the clearer and brighter the better. “At Bloomcraft, the assistants say hot pink is my neutral. Color can never be too bright for me,” says Angsten, who is wearing a lipstick-red blazer over a black turtleneck and skirt.
“I wasn’t ever afraid of color,” says Angsten, recalling the silk kimonos beloved by her paternal grandmother and the generous use of color that filled her childhood homes in Winnetka, where she was raised and where her parents still live.
“My mother had just incredible taste. She has a flair. She was a model and she loved fashion,” says Angsten, the oldest of four children. Her father, Henry William Angsten Jr., retired as chairman of the family firm, Corey Steel Co. in Cicero.
Angsten is a granddaughter of Henry William Angsten Sr., a philanthropist and devoted sailor who became commodore of the Chicago Yacht Club the year she was born.
Since 1946, her late uncle, Timme Angsten, the founder of the Northwestern University Sailing Club, has been honored every Thanksgiving when college crews brave the frigid waters of Lake Michigan in the Timme Angsten Memorial Regatta.
After graduation from New Trier West, Angsten went to Providence, R.I., to study at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in fine arts.
Although she had planned to be a painting major, she found herself fascinated by three-dimensional design and turned to sculpture.
That decision may explain the unusual depth in Angsten’s florals and other designs, but the year she spent in Rome on a senior honors program may explain the warmth and sunny clarity of the colors in her painting.
“The light in Rome,” she says, savoring the memory. “The light is like this orange, warm light. It was incredible. I started doing watercolors there.”
Studying in museums, jogging along the Tiber River in the morning and shopping in the open-air markets, Angsten found herself entranced by the colors of Italy.
Basic instincts
“My ideas come from everywhere. I sort of absorb things. The light, the color. I may see something on a dress or flowers in a field. That’s how I’m inspired,” says Angsten, whose favorite artists include the Impressionists Edouard Manet and Claude Monet, Post-Impressionist Paul Cezanne and the American painter John Singer Sargent.
In fact, Zinnias, one of her patterns for Contempo paper goods, came right from her own back yard. Bouquets of zinnias she had gathered for an outdoor party at her Long Island weekend home suddenly caught her eye and then her paintbrush.
The film “The Age of Innocence” provided the spark for her next wallcoverings collection, she says. Called Gramercy Park, the fabrics and papers will recall the florals, medallion motifs and muted colors favored in the most elegant of 19th Century American homes.
After graduating college, Angsten wasn’t sure exactly what she should do, but she was sure what she shouldn’t. “I didn’t want to just get a painting studio and be alone. I probably could have gone back to Chicago and done that because my father was very supportive of my work. But I wanted to be part of a design community.”
After being turned down by ad agencies for lack of experience, she visited Brewster, a now-defunct firm that designed fabric for the apparel industry.
“They wanted to see my paintings. I brought them and I got the job,” says Angsten, smiling at the memory of bringing into the firm a portfolio full of oils, pastels, watercolors and sketches of Italian landscapes.”Their philosophy at this place was that they did not want people with textile background. They wanted artists, they wanted painters and people who could draw.”
After Brewster, Angsten spent six years with the firm founded by the late Bob Van Allen, who pioneered the American market in designer home furnishings. In 1986, with the help of her father and the encouragement of her then-fiance Kittle, Angsten opened her own firm, Laurette Design Inc.
From studio to factory
She was ready. At Brewster and with Van Allen, Angsten had learned about technique, dyes, color and how to work with a mill.
Looking around her workroom, its walls festooned with swatches of fabric, paper and paintings, she says, “What I do here is design something on paper, which is sent out to the engraver and engraved. Then, you work out all the colorways,” she says, referring to the different color combinations a pattern may be printed in. And then you go to the mill.
“You actually go to the factory where they’re printing rolls of fabric. They bring pieces of fabric in and you have your little painting with you and you look at it and say, `The blue needs to be 20 percent lighter or the green needs to be a little yellower.’
“Usually, on the third batch, you get it. That’s the final one, you sign your name on it and that’s the standard that they will always match to.”
But getting to this point isn’t easy. Angsten typically will design more than a dozen patterns before settling on five and can spend two months just developing the colorways for each pattern.
Her ideas, she says, always begin with designs for fabric. However, she has no wish to become a clothing designer.
“I would really rather be known for home furnishings and I’d rather be known for a look: floral, brushstrokes and color,” she says.
At this point, the Laurette look is pretty well-established. The last big task is to get people to know her name.
