Charles Stendig dies at age 99; Introduced fanciful furniture from abroad

Charles Stendig, who introduced contemporary and avant-garde European furniture to adventurous Americans in his New York City showroom, died Feb. 11 at his home in Manhattan. He was 99.

His death was announced by R & companya furniture gallery in TriBeCa to which Mr. Stendig donated his design library and business archives.

There was a period, beginning in the 1960s, when the American living room went happily into disarray and became a showcase for space age and pop art design. The future had arrived, and it was plastic and fantastic and full of optimism, reflecting the mod revolution in fashion. Mr. Stendig had a large hand in it, seeking out European manufacturers, including from Finland, at a time when freight was cheap.

Fearless and gregarious, he was the first and for a time the only American importer of Finnish designer Eero Aarnio's bubble furniture. such as the Ball Chair, a cocoon-like plastic sphere that is lined on the inside and often comes with its own telephone. It had a cameo in the 1960s British television series “The Prisoner” and other dystopian classics.

On one mission, Mr. Stendig flew to Prague, then part of the Soviet bloc, to persuade Thonet factory executives to continue making the bentwood and wicker dining room chairs of the 1920s, where they were stopped during the Second World War. he also wanted to import them. The catch was that he had to guarantee production costs for a year, he told Marisa Bartolucci, a design writer who profiled him in 2016 for the antique and modern furniture site 1stDibs, where vintage Stendig pieces now sells for thousands of dollars.

The risk was worth it. For a time in the late 1960s, wicker chairs, now avatars of modern design, seemed ubiquitous in certain American households.

Mr. Stendig also sold the elegant leather and chrome furniture of Marcel Breuer, the Hungarian-German Bauhaus architect and designer, including his Wassily chairnamed after the painter Wassily Kandinsky.

In Italy, he embraced the Radical Design movement, led by mischievous Italian designers who poke fun at consumer culture by creating arched and ironic pieces such as the Bocca, also known as the Marilyn sofa, a bright red foam and jersey number shaped like a pair of lips. Mr. Stendig brought it to his showroom in Manhattan.

The Bocca was designed by architect Franco Audrito for Studio 65, the design collective he co-founded, and created by Gufram, a company known for playful foam pieces, such as a pleasantly goofy looking cactus designed by Guido Drocco and Franco Mello. Mr Stendig sold that too.

The Marilyn sofa was an irresistible pop art icon, appearing on magazine covers and apparently picked up by Hugh Hefner for the Playboy Mansion. Yet Mr. Stendig sold only four, as he told Evan Snyderman, president of R & Company. Radical chic wasn't cheap back then.

Mr. Stendig imported the worm-like Non-stop bank, a wavy leather creation with parts zipped together ad infinitum, designed by Eleonore Peduzzi-Riva, an Italian architect; the nine-inch sections cost $155 in 1974 (about $1,000 in today's currency).

Mr. Stendig was optimistic about sectionals. In addition to the Non-Stop Sofa, he sold parts in stretch velvet that fit together in a semicircle.

Then there was Joe, named after Joe DiMaggio, a loveseat in the shape of a gigantic leather baseball glove, including stitching, with the thick fingers supporting the back. When it made its American debut in Stendig's showroom in 1970, it cost $1,500 (more than $12,000 today) — not an easy sell, as he told The New York Times.

Joe – designed by a trio of Italian architects, Jonathan De Pas, Donato D'Urbino and Paolo Lomazzi – was included in a celebrated exhibition of Italian design in 1972 called “The new domestic landscape” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

But Mr. Stendig showed it first.

His business was known as “to the trade,” which meant he sold to architects and designers, who would then sell the pieces to their clients. This arrangement inadvertently led to one of modern design's most enduring and coveted objects.

For a promotional Christmas giveaway in 1966, Mr. Stendig asked Massimo Vignelli, the Italian designer of the New York City subway map, among other things, to design a calendar. Back then, supergraphics – huge architectural elements of type and form – were having a moment. Mr. Vignelli had always wanted to make a huge calendar with numbers that you could see from across the studio floor. What he came up with was a simple grid of one meter by one meter, with the letters of the days of the week at the top and the numbers in rows below, all rendered in pure black Helvetica type on a white background and aligned to the left. .

The calendar became an almost instant design classic and the Museum of Modern Art acquired it for its permanent collection.

“If you think about the tradition of the promotional calendar, of half-naked girls sitting on tractors that are hung at gas stations around the country,” Michael Bierut, former vice president of graphic design at Vignelli Associates, said by phone, “what Massimo did was to base the sex appeal of his calendar on how big and beautiful those numbers are. It's still so fresh. It's almost cheerful.”

The calender is still in production. (Mr. Bierut pointed out that the sheets used are great modernist wrapping paper.)

Suzanne Slesin, a former design reporter for The Times and now editor-in-chief of Pointed Leaf Press, which publishes design and art books, said of Mr. Stendig: “He liked modern furniture, and he had fun, and it showed. And he was the only one showing this wild and beautiful contemporary furniture. It was him.”

Charles William Stendig was born on October 25, 1924 in Brooklyn, the only child of Irving and Rose (Blum) Stendig. His father was an electrician. Charles served as a paratrooper during World War II and then studied business at New York University on the GI Bill. He was a traveling furniture and tableware salesman on the West Coast before striking out on his own in New York.

In a bar, over a beer, Mr. Stendig met a Finnish trade representative, who told him that the furniture industry was flourishing in his country and invited him to come and see Finland.

His visit, in a Finnair propeller plane, lasted 26 hours and four refuelings, he told Ms Bartolucci. The air terminal was a Quonset hut. But when he was taken to Lahti, the furniture capital of Finland, Mr. Stendig was impressed by the pristine factories and work he saw, from designers like Mr. Aarnio, Ilmari Lappalainen and others.

The trip inspired him to start his own business. With a $300 loan from Paul Secon, a founder of Pottery Barn, which at the time was selling somewhat defective ceramic “seconds” from a warehouse in Chelsea, Mr. Stendig opened a showroom in a Midtown brownstone in 1956. That same year he married Eleanore Brustein, and together they built the business, opening showrooms in Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Burlington Industries purchased the company in 1971, and the Stendigs remained as managers until 1976, when the company was purchased again. The couple retired and turned to philanthropy, including supporting the UJA-Federation of New York and sponsoring a scholarship program that allowed Scandinavian students to study design in the US, called 'Thanks to Scandinavia'.

Mrs. Stendig died in 2012. Mr. Stendig leaves no immediate survivors.