Jack Lenor Larsen was ready for his close-up. “It’s nun’s veiling,” he said of the sheer, black, collarless suit he was wearing that summer day, “designed by my friend Massimo Vignelli. It’s cooler than cotton.”
Larsen is a man of the cloth, but it’s not like that. He is possibly the most accomplished textile designer living, certainly one of the most innovative and influential of the second half of the 20th Century. With the success of several thousand fabric patterns behind him–many as original as Modern architecture–he has been prolific and powerful in the design community. And through the collections that his travels inspired, the middle-class home and office became conversant with vibrant traditions everywhere–from Thailand to Kenya.
The handsome Larsen’s life also has been a fabric of sorts, of acquaintance with the rich and celebrated, of social prowess and business sense that have brought him fame and fortune, travels that have wrapped the world and homes that led the fashionable world to his door.
Now, at 71, he has published an autobiography, “Jack Lenor Larsen-A Weaver’s Memoir” (Harry Abrams Inc., $39.95). Friends–he has known everyone, from Marilyn Monroe to Frank Lloyd Wright–undoubtedly have heard these stories at the table at Longhouse Reserve, his 12,000-square-foot home on Long Island, which is also an arts foundation and a 16-acre garden open to the public. Larsen spins a good tale.
Larsen doffs a hat–a black straw Amish number–and points to the label inside.
“They’re called `Park Avenue,’ but they come from Muncie,” he said.
Jack Lenor Larsen lives in East Hampton and on Park Avenue, but as he would have you remember, he is a weaver from Seattle. He was born in 1927, to Danish-Norwegian immigrants from Canada. The simplicity of Larsen’s Northwest background still can be felt in his presence–the warp to the weft of his sophistication, deeply rooted in the Douglas firs and Olympic and Cascade Mountains and glacial, salmon bays of Puget Sound. His father was a building contractor. Intrigued with design, Larsen studied architecture at the University of Washington. In 1945, there was great interest in the Northwest in crafts. In his junior year, the young designer took a weaving course that put his future in his hands.
“After two years of architecture, drafting things that would never be built, weaving felt good indeed,” he recalled. “It had horizontals and verticals, like architecture, and was dependent on materials and light and shadows, but I had real yarns and real color and real structure.”
He moved to Los Angeles as part of a company of unattached young friends involved in art, design, music and dance. They roved the coast; Larsen wove cloth from pine cones and seed pods scavenged on beaches.
He met Dorothea Hulse, who owned Handcraft House, a custom weave shop and a school to the stars. Home crafts like weaving were voguish in Hollywood in the 1950s; she gave him work teaching weaving.
The Midwest’s Hollywood
Larsen had a brief stint back in Seattle. He hung out his sign, “Jack Larsen–Weaver,” on his studio door. A woman brought him pants to mend. A professor from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., offered him work as a teaching assistant.
“For designers, Cranbrook was a kind of Hollywood,” he said.
He made himself known to Eleanor Lloyd Richards, who had taught there. “She was from a Dutch family that owned the upper East Side,” Larsen said. In 1952, when Larsen arrived in New York, Richards wrote him a check to help him bring his loom and 40 boxes of belongings with him.
With his background in architecture and his enthusiasm for new technologies, the young weaver was gaining a reputation as a modernist–innovating in a field that was barely there: contemporary commercial fabric design. Modern architectural and interior design found themselves with an American audience in the 1940s and ’50s, but there were few fabrics to fit the clean furniture or drape the glass picture windows.
Asked to submit a design for a curtain for Lever House–New York’s first International Style office building–Larsen’s entry, which was chosen, was a drapery of translucent lace woven with linen cord and gold metal, an exotic match of materials for which he would become well-known.
By 1953, Larsen was incorporated. “I had a Beverly Hills debutante as my weaving assistant,” he said. Neither had ever worked before. They hand-wove “shaggy” craft neckties that found themselves noosed on New York’s best-known necks, “the people I most admired,” said Larsen, “like Sandy Calder and I.M. Pei and Leonard Bernstein.” Florence Knoll, the Modern design doyenne, who had turned down his portfolio in 1951 for being “too individualistic,” commissioned furniture fabrics in a palette of olives and Spanish oranges that became the “avocado” and “harvest gold” of the 1960s.
By 1954, he had a showroom on Park Avenue at 58th Street. Marilyn Monroe walked in with her decorator, shopping for the house in Connecticut she was setting up with Arthur Miller. Frank Lloyd Wright walked in, and walked out with 200 yards of a shimmering blue-green fabric for the music room at Taliesen.
As a weaver, Larsen had established a branch of architecture, the design of fabrics based as much on adventurous structure–pre-Columbian or postwar American–as aesthetics. “I like ancient techniques and the cutting-edge,” he said. “The extremes are always more interesting than the middle.”
By 1958, he had designed his first upholstery fabrics for airplanes–Pan American’s new 707 fleet. He showed the American public the world, long before they became global consumers, through ikats and batiks that were familiar only to the privileged. By 1974, Jack Lenor Larsen Inc. was producing fabrics in 30 countries.
Unlike world leaders, international weavers understood each other–by watching. Cloth was like an early map.Today, Larsen’s great love is home, which is largely Longhouse Reserve, completed in 1992 in collaboration–their 30th–with Charles Forberg, an architect. It is an imposing house on stilts, suggested by the Shinto shrine in Ise, Japan.
His collections of ancient and contemporary crafts, including textiles, ceramics and furniture, have followed him there, and continue to grow, as does the garden with its own art collection. There is also an arboretum–Larsen collects trees. Last year, he sold Larsen Inc. to Cowtan and Tout, a fabric and wallcoverings company.
“When I finished the house, I wanted to put an epitaph on it,” he said. ” `To The Manor Died’–I wasn’t to the manor born.” Larsen, leading a brisk tour through the garden–the briskest takes about 45 minutes–was debating the offer of a gift of Italian cypresses made to the foundation that morning. Past an allee of cedar trunks painted red, his parents’ ashes under a fir leaf birch and a Buckminster Fuller open-air dome, loaned this summer by his daughter, Larsen moved his small group toward Longhouse, a 180-foot-long building hovering above man-made dunes.
Inside, Larsen did a quick walkabout in the living room, beneath its 65-foot skylight.Then he strode the length of the house, past the center A-frame stairwell with its two-story Dale Chihuly lizard-green glass pendant to the smaller, more intimate sitting room in Larsen’s private quarters.
The peaked room is tented, in the style of Napoleon, in a Larsen fabric, “Canterbury,” a jacquard weave of Egyptian linen designed in the 1970s.
“I’d hoped this tented ceiling and fabric walls would become a national trend,” Larsen said. “It didn’t.”
Memories on a shelf
The campaign-style room is neatly, snugly enfolded in Larsen’s own personal collections.
There is a Swedish ceramic stove with two ebony Philippine armchairs before it. To the side is an 18th Century painted-cloth Iranian camp table that displays a box turtle shell found on the property and a 19th Century American patent ladder, which is used as bookshelves. There are five uncharacteristically delicate Edward Wormley tables and a good representation of pieces by Wharton Esherick, the dean of American craft furniture makers. A pretty varnished rolling table was his mother’s.
“Somebody made it in the Navy yard in Seattle for cribbage,” he said.
Many of the interior walls at Longhouse are sliding panels, stretched with fabric, a device based on a Japanese architectural element, the paper-panel fusama, which creates rooms and conceals storage. An opaque, woven leather cloth in the bedroom conceals clothes and bath towels; a sheer linen threaded with hand-clipped Thai silk floats to showcase, in silhouette, shelves of ceramic collections. Other panels, rolled aside, reveal a short history of ceramics–Yi-xing wine pots, Han Dynasty heads, a Dansk design of Larsen’s and a vase by Dame Lucy Rie, the British studio potter and a friend.
Larsen picked the vase from the shelf, turning the milky ceramic in his hands as though it were a face he was trying to revolve into view.
“She became like an abbess, always in white,” he said. “Frail, almost like blowing dandelion down.”
Larsen keeps his influences, experiences and memories on a shelf–behind him, for others to admire. Weavers live for surprise–that burst of firsts when paths intersect.
“I maintained the fantasy, until I was about 34, that I wasn’t really working,” Larsen said. “It occurred to me that I spent more hours doing what I did than anyone I knew. Other people would call it work,” he said, composing a salad–beets for color, walnuts for texture, string beans for structure and lettuce greens for form. “But I’m just playing very hard.”
In Chicago, Jack Lenor Larsen’s fabrics are sold exclusively (through the trade) at Cowtan and Tout, Suite 638, The Merchandise Mart, Wells and Kinzie Streets; 312-644-0717. Fabrics range from $50 a yard for synthetic window treatments to $400 a yard for silk velvet.
