The Out Crowd

Susan Latempa

07/01/2003

It comes as no surprise that three designers who have influenced the way we think about outdoor style—David Tisherman, Janice Feldman and Richard Frinier—each have homes in California that devote nearly as much territory to the outside as the inside.

David Tisherman, whose water features and pools are works of art, lives—where else?—at the beach. Janice Feldman, whose Janus et Cie showrooms highlight beautifully designed and environmentally friendly furniture, has her home and private office in an idyllic garden setting. Richard Frinier, who has transformed outdoor furniture through innovative materials, lives in a hillside house shaded by a canopy of palm trees.

Drawing inspiration from nature as well as from the worlds of art and technology, these designers have crossed new thresholds in recent years, expanding their activities and widening their spheres of influence.

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DAVID TISHERMAN

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“I’ve spent all my summers playing at the beach,” says Tisherman, who resides in Manhattan Beach. “Even as an adult, I’ve spent many hours doing nothing, just watching the water.” Tisherman approaches his work as an artist whose medium is water. But while he is commissioned primarily to create water features—ponds, waterfalls, pools—they are just one facet of a home’s external environment. Working with landscape designers, Tisherman integrates everything—the exterior walls of a residence, trees, pavement, adjacent natural landscape and even distant views—into his overall concept. (Click image to enlarge)
For one Beverly Hills mansion, he created a mill pond with a waterwheel. For a couple whose taste in art was global, ethnic and colorful, he was inspired by the work of Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta to design “the only pool I know of ever plastered red in the United States.” Tisherman, whose water features start at $150,000, specializes in difficult sites. “I’ve built pools off the side of a slope where there is no slope in the Hollywood Hills, Tennessee, and Puerto Vallarta,” he says. “I have two pools sitting on piles at the Jersey shore. In Napa, a house is cantilevered off the mountain with nothing in the backyard except air, and we’re going to be putting a pool there.” (Click image to enlarge)

“Water is nothing more than a reflective surface, so if it’s used properly, it takes on a dynamic of color, of light, of sound, of movement,” he adds. “It has the qualities of the surrounding area. A gentle breeze over water creates an incredible amount of color: reflections and refractions. Bounce light off water, and you create wonderful visual images on adjacent objects.” (Click image to enlarge)

Along with partners Brian Van Bower and Skip Phillips, Tisherman founded the Genesis 3 Design School, which he calls “probably the only educational tool in the entire pool industry.” Pool designers, architects, and builders from around the world gather for conferences to learn about design concepts, structural and hydraulic engineering, art history, vanishing-edge design, soil issues, and other specialized topics.

”I love what I do,” says Tisherman. “I have this incredible passion and love for the water environment, its beauty. Of all the materials, all the elements we deal with, water is the most visually satisfying.”

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JANICE FELDMAN

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“I really do live the way I’ve promoted my business for 25 years,” says Janice Feldman, owner of the furniture showrooms Janus et Cie in Los Angeles, New York, and High Point, N.C. Her house in Montecito, Calif., is, she says, “absolutely heaven for me, and truly my sanctuary. I have a beautiful garden and gorgeous landscape all around me, and my doors and windows are open constantly. When I come back to the house, I am restored, I am rejuvenated, and I am inspired.” (Click image to enlarge)

Feldman, who started out as a painter and “always loved gardens and always loved history,” recently opened her New York and North Carolina showrooms. “I got to a place in my personal life where I had the experience, the confidence, the respect in the business, and the intuition to make a move,” says Feldman. “I had this personal power that came to me. It was quite amazing. I knew that we wanted to go into New York and that we wanted to make the business into a national company. Then three years ago I decided to start a retail division. We’re not looking for every single customer. We’re looking for the top 200 retail customers in the U.S.” (Click image to enlarge)

Feldman’s interest in sustainable resources and “green” manufacturing techniques is an important aspect of her work, and she is excited about furniture lines made of environmentally friendly materials such as Hularo, a synthetic weaving fiber.

“I’ve been involved in the green side of things industrially for many years. I invested in a company years ago that manufactures lumber from recycled milk containers. It’s a piece of my business that a lot of people on the more decorative side don’t know about. But we supply lumber to the federal government, to municipalities, to universities.
“Twelve or 13 years ago, it was a struggle to get people to realize they should and could ‘reconsume’ products by using recycled materials. Little by little, I started peeling away the layers of resistance and we started getting really wonderful success stories. So I’m excited about the Hularo furniture because that business is growing and there are a lot of variable environmental issues handled by that material.”

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RICHARD FRINIER

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After 20 years with Brown Jordan International, Richard Frinier retired as chief creative officer just over a year ago—but he did not retire from the outdoor furniture business. As a design consultant, he is currently working with several companies, notably Dedon, for whom he designs collections of Hularo furniture (distributed through Janus et Cie), and Century, with whom he has created the Frinier Century brand that is debuting a collection of teak and cast aluminum furniture this season. (Click image to enlarge)

He and his wife Catherine live on a hillside in Long Beach overlooking the Pacific Ocean. “Half of the property is an outdoor courtyard,” says Richard. “We’re surrounded by very tall palm trees so we find ourselves in a palm court. About a third of the courtyard is a patio with a colonnade over which hang swags of fabric. It’s not 100 percent opaque, so it allows sunlight to filter in, but it creates an outdoor room. It’s where we have tables and chairs from a collection I did for Brown Jordan some 15 years ago called Venetian, which has always been one of my favorites. It’s still in their line today.”
Much of Frinier’s inspiration through the years has come from the materials he’s worked with, including teak, Hularo and stainless steel. He is also on the leading edge of developing new categories of outdoor furniture—working with balcony height furniture, for example, which allows you to see over the railing; and experimenting with outdoor lighting that would be weather-resistant and cordless but would, he says, “look like an elegant table or floor lamp.”

Upstairs, inside his hillside home, is one of Frinier’s latest pieces for Dedon, the Daydream bed. It was designed to withstand the outdoor environment but, like most of his furniture, it is up to the customer to decide where to place it. “When I created Daydream, I was thinking of a luxury we rarely have: time to daydream,” he says. “This daybed would be a place you could go to let your mind wander and reflect. It starts off as a platform, really more of a magic carpet, with an undulation, a sort of movement as if it were beginning to lift off and float away.

“To that platform you can add poles—one at a time, or two or four. And then you have the option of adding panels. You could actually put panels all around. You could make a chaise or a sectional or a loveseat or an enclosed bed with headboard and footboard. The poles are like tent poles. At the top is what I call the sky—very sheer fabric that catches the wind, and, with another little accessory we have, a wind chime, it would add to the movement and sound and the magic of this flying carpet. This didn’t need 12 or 14 pieces in the collection. This is the collection.”

David Tisherman, 310.379.6700, 856.489.8508, www.tisherman.com
Janice Feldman, Janus et Cie, 310.652.7090, www.janusetcie.com
Richard Frinier, frinier@aol.com