SIMPLE SOLUTION
WITH ASIAN FURNITURE-MAKING TECHNIQUES AND INSPIRATION, MARIA YEE’S FURNITURE DESIGNS OFFER AN ANTIDOTE TO A FRENZIED LIFESTYLE
Even if this is the first time you’ve ever heard Maria Yee’s name or seen her face, you already know her — or, rather, her style.
Yee’s simple but beautiful furniture designs hold within them a statement — or maybe it’s a wish — to live simply.
Her style has more than one look, and reflects the same graceful moves that keep her in step with changing lifestyles.
“I don’t have so much the desire for people to know that it is my name on the design,” says Yee, whose furniture is as functional as it is a piece of art. Stores that sell her work include Room & Board, Retrospect and Crate and Barrel, and CAI Design’s to-the-trade showrooms.
“I don’t have the desire for people to know so much about me, Maria Yee,” she says. “But it makes me very happy to see people enjoy and appreciate the design, and then say, ‘Yes, this is a beautiful piece.’ “
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To know Maria Yee is to know more about her work. It is like a classic Coco Chanel black dress or a softly tailored Vera Wang gown. The beauty is in the details — those little things that matter and that you might not notice.
“With contemporary [design], it’s very easy to dress up or dress down,” says Yee, who is very much like her design style: spare and free, from her signature short hairstyle to her Mandarin-style blouse and slacks.
Her aura of joy is contagious. She smiles and laughs easily, bringing this out in others.
“Oh, I really don’t like a lot of fuss. I only let my husband cut my hair,” she says with a shake of her head and a giggle. “I like it this way.”
Her husband, Peter Yee, is his wife’s beloved barber and the chairman of Maria Yee Inc., which is based in Santa Cruz, Calif.
It’s a style that becomes her and who she is. But there is much more to the 51-year-old Yee. There is a shadow of pain from her adolescence in China during the Cultural Revolution (the Chinese Communist Party’s brutal campaign to wipe out the influence of “bourgeois intellectuals”).
A chaotic time
While Yee’s designs are simple and unrestrained, her young life was constrained and chaotic.
She was born in Guangzhou, in southern China. In 1966, during the Cultural Revolution, her father, a professor of architecture, and her mother were imprisoned. Yee, who was 12 then, was sent to work in a rock quarry.
From 1968 to 1970 she did not know where her parents were. One day, a man slipped her a balled-up note that told her where to go so she could hear — but not see — her mother.
“I didn’t know the man, so when he put this paper in my hand I didn’t understand until I read the note,” Yee says. “My mother was held in an old Christian elementary school. She was kept in the basement with no windows. There was a tiny gap between two stones. In the note she told me to stand near these stones so she could see me. I could hear her say my name.”
“I would go at night when there were storms and lightning so no one would suspect,” Yee says.
Her father was kept on the second floor of a student dormitory. Eventually, word of mouth led her to her father.
“I’d pass the building so my father could wave to me from the window,” says Yee, one of four children and the only daughter. “For two years, this is how I saw my father.”
Her father was later sent to work on a tea farm about 50 miles away and her mother was sent to a pig farm for two years.
Yee says her eldest brother was sent to work in iron mines for 10 years, her second-oldest brother was sent to a rice farm for five years and her younger brother was left in her care.
“It was just me and my younger brother during these bad times,” Yee says. “I took care of him. We lived on $2.40 a month for seven years.”
But the family survived. Yee migrated to Hong Kong in 1981 and then to California in 1988. Her parents soon followed. Her father, Kechang Li, died last January at the age of 87. He lived to see his daughter become a successful designer and to see her plans for a new factory to be built near her hometown in southern China. Yee’s mother, Manfang He, now 77, lives in San Francisco.
Joy in the present
The years of sadness now are eclipsed by Yee’s present joy in her family and her design work.
Her children influenced some of her latest furniture. Her son, Antares, inspired the Coronet table with its chess-piece base, and her daughter, Capella, inspired the Gossamer table with its “pick-up-sticks” base. Recent designs also include beds and tables with lattice detail.
What’s evident in her work is a sure design hand, one that straightens an Asian-style leg or gives a graceful turn to a round table.
“I freely play around with the elements of the [Asian] culture,” Yee says. “I enjoy and I try to learn from others. But always I keep the pure of myself in the design.”
Says John Gabbert, owner and president of Room & Board and Retrospect stores: “What she brings is a real reflection of culture. Furniture does reflect what goes on in culture and different points of view. Everything she does has that influence one way or another.
“I think a lot of who she is and what she’s been through shows in her work,” Gabbert says.
When Yee left China, she vowed never to return. But her path has brought her back to Guangzhou, where her furniture now is made. The way in which it is manufactured sets it apart from other furniture. Yee uses traditional Chinese and Asian joinery techniques, no screws, no nails — rather a smooth fit of one piece of wood as if promised to another.
On June 30, Yee will celebrate the opening of her new 400,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art factory near her hometown. The factory, nearly double in size, is expected to employ 500 to 600 people.
“I never thought I would go back again,” Yee says. “And now I feel I have the chance to do something, to create something good.”
Collaboration
Yee begins her design work from sketches. Though the designs are hers, she modifies them to the signature style of each retailer, collaborating with the buyers from Room & Board and Crate and Barrel, who began selling her furniture in 1998. “Like any collaborative [effort],” Gabbert says, “it’s hard to tell where one person stops and the other begins.”
She has about 120 designs at Room & Board. The Minneapolis-based chain, which also owns Retrospect, is known for its contemporary take on furniture. Retrospect, which has about 60 Yee designs, is known for its traditional take on design.
Her furniture is designer beautiful and price accessible. Prices at Crate and Barrel run from $349 for a side table to almost $3,000 for an armoire; at Room & Board, prices are $299 for the Shinto end table to $1,399 for the Empress dining table. Her Corona cocktail table is $799 and Corona dining table $1,199.
“I was attracted to her simplicity,” says Mary Bolts, CAI showroom buyer and coordinator. “Designers who purchase Maria Yee’s work add pieces throughout the home. The wood is so beautiful that it blends with almost anything.”
Yee’s designs are made from hardwoods found in China. “It is all good timber, the best timber,” she says. “I try to use the timber I have a good feeling about and character of the wood so it can show the beauty of the design.”
“Many people don’t understand that wood is a material that continues to live,” says Beth Ridlon, Crate and Barrel senior product manager. “Wood continues to live and move. When talking solid wood, you must construct it so that it doesn’t crack so as not to damage the line of the design.”
Yee, who has a degree in mechanical engineering, points to the influence of her father and the everyday lessons he taught her — from how to dry chopsticks to recognizing quality in fabric and the details that make the difference in construction.
The results of these lessons are in her designs. Look inside one of her cabinets, lie on your back under any of her dining tables, run a bare foot up the leg of a table and a hand under a tabletop. The smooth fit of wood into wood — sometimes at least 2 inches thick — is a testament to her vision.
“The people are so high-pressured in their work,” Yee says of those who buy her furniture. “There are so many things and challenges in their work, so much complexity and competition. I think after all of that complexity, people want to go to the pure nature and something like this: simplicity, peaceful, quiet and solid.”
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Where to buy
Maria Yee furniture and merchandise are available at these locations:
Room & Board and Retrospect, www.roomandboard.com or call 800-486-6554.
Crate and Barrel, www.crateandbarrel.com or call 800-967-6696.
CAI Design (to the trade only), The Merchandise Mart, suite 1619, or call 312-755-9163.
Maria Yee Inc., www.mariayee.com.
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What’s ahead in the New Wave
Next
– July 25: “Technology drives design” today, says Shea Soucie, who with Martin Horner makes up the top Chicago-based design firm Soucie Horner Ltd. It’s that kind of understanding of clients’ needs and desires that has made their work such a success — that and their new perspectives and impressive amounts of education, skill and energy.
Other upcoming stories
– Peter and Marilyn Frank are F2. The Skokie couple have been blowing glass in Chicago for three years and blowing the minds of those who love cool art and design. Marilyn, a graphic designer whose work includes print design to commercial film and video, and Peter, who is a sculptor and glass blower, have married their talent and imagination to create glass lighting and vessels seemingly as weightless as a whisper.
– Guess what’s coming back? Wallpaper — and Kyra and Robertson Harnett, the barely-30 founders of the Brooklyn-based design studio, twenty2, saw it coming and decided to offer hand-screened wallpaper in a modern graphics-inspired mode. Their fresh take is filling a void where few such products existed.
Previous
– As a textile designer, Liz Galbraith puts a certain singular stamp on her work. She is the only artisan in the United States using hand-blocking, a method of producing patterns on cloth that goes back to biblical times, to create a commercial line of fabrics. While this is a primitive method, the result is so appealing that chic world-class designers such as Nina Campbell fancy her fabrics and her work is turning up in home-furnishing stores, mail-order catalogs and venues from the Bahamas to Beijing as the latest in fashion-forward decorating. (See the May 30 issue of Home&Garden)
– Fast becoming known for the lyrical, sensuous things he is creating, 25-year-old Paul Cocksedge surprises and delights with the way he harnesses conductive properties and unleashes creativity on lighting designs. (See the April 18 issue of Home&Garden.)
– Being the eldest of six children, architect-designer Josiane Raphael was responsible for the most fragile things in the family’s West African home. When it was time to set the table, Raphael’s mother entrusted her to put out the linens and the china. Today, with her Ebotan by Josiane Raphael tableware and flatware, the 38-year-old is setting tables with “blessings” and fine china that rival those of more well-known chinamakers such as Bernardaud, Lenox, Noritake, Royal Doulton and Wedgwood. (See the March 7 issue of Home&Garden.)
– In a matter of about five years, Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec of France — designers of furniture, furnishings and “micro architecture” — have managed to turn some of the most important heads in the design business; be lauded by the design press; publish two books; mount exhibitions galore; and assemble a body of work that successful designers twice their age would be proud to call their own. A French journalist likened their philosophy to a Japanese haiku — strong, poetic and crystal clear. (See the Jan. 18 issue of Home&Garden.)
– In the world of artisans, The New Wave is a virtual tsunami of talent. Painter Anne Leuck Feldhaus, furniture designer and woodworker Jamey Rouch, ceramist Heather Hug, glass blowers Douglas and Renee Sigwarth — all featured at the One of a Kind Show and Sale at The Merchandise Mart — are part of this brave new wave. (See the Nov. 30, 2003 issue of Home&Garden.)
