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Paul Nordmann
David Calvin
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Paul Nordmann
Martin Goebel
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Paul Nordmann
Rocio Romero
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Paul Nordmann
Marcella Marie
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Paul Nordmann
Janet Sanders and John Leible
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Paul Nordmann
Amanda Verbeck
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Paul Nordmann
Retta Leritz
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Paul Nordmann
Margaret von Kaenel
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Paul Nordmann
Sam Stang
David Calvin
David Calvin Furniture Studio
For years, David Calvin built swimming pools full time and furniture on the side. But two years ago, he stopped working in concrete and started spending his days creating furniture with fanciful veneer finishes, selling them through David Calvin Furniture Studio (314-605-1313, dcfurniturestudio.com). He puts veneers inside his pieces’ drawers and on the bottom of small tables or trays. “I’ve always known that I needed to get that creative outlet out,” Calvin says. “I thought it was making the furniture itself, but now that I have discovered the colorful veneers and all that, it opens up fun new worlds for me—and I hope clients as well.” Calvin veneers absolutely everything—right down to his small notebook. Some veneers include tiny triangles in a variety of colors; others, a kaleidoscope of shades. “I love doing this Escher-type stuff,” he says. The pieces are pricey (an end table is $1,500, while an armoire can run to approximately $5,000), but you can get a sample of Calvin’s artistry for a song. A cutting board is available for $20, and picture frames start at $40.
Martin Goebel
Goebel & Co. Furniture
A tree falls in the woods, and Martin Goebel heads out to salvage it. Then, often without altering the outline of the trunk, including forks for branches, he turns it into a table that’s long enough to seat a small army. The wood’s swirls turn the slab into a work of art. The bark edges remain intact. After stints at five colleges, Goebel went to work as a digital designer at Thos. Moser. As head of his own company, Goebel & Co. Furniture (314-807-1745, goebelfurniture.com), he says his goal is “uncompromisingly high-quality—but affordable—furniture. It’s generational,” he says.“An heirloom is reparable, and it’s a connection to the past.” He started his line at the ripe old age of 29 with two partners, Noah Alexander and Nick Leidenfrost, both past clients and local entrepreneurs. He has four lines: production pieces, like his signature Cruz stools; custom-built pieces for residential customers; couture pieces that are built on spec and are available for purchase; and commercial furniture.
Rocio Romero
Rocio Romero, LLC
The architectural world stopped and took note more than a decade ago when Rocio Romero (314-367-2500, rocioromero.com) first unveiled the LV Series Home, a sleek prefab house that is long on modernist perfection and short on frivolous detail. At the time, the young architectural designer was living in Perryville with her husband, Cale Bradford. Then, with their baby twins in tow, they relocated to the Central West End. Along the way, she tweaked the LV line to make the residences bigger in both length and width. “When we first started out to do this business, it was a vacation-home line,” Romero says. “As we started getting more customers, we realized people are using this as a main home.” This summer, she launched a new outdoor furniture line. It includes a hexagonal fire pit, a side table, a bench that can store wood, and matching accessories. “I feel like a kid again, because I have been learning and experimenting,” Romero says. “It has really been a fun ride. The whole prototype phase takes a long time, and we had to create enough products for an outdoor environment that it feels like a collection.” After more than a year of working on the outdoor line, she is selling the pieces on her website. It’s just the beginning.
Marcella Marie
Marcella Marie Faux Bois
“I’ll spend hours on wormholes,” says concrete sculptor Marcella Marie, who takes the man-made material and forms it into furniture that looks exactly like wood, selling it under the name Marcella Marie Faux Bois (314-775-1231, marcellamariefauxbois.com). A metalsmith by training, Marie became captivated by concrete and researched it at the library. She forayed into ferrocement faux bois, a 19th-century European art of molding fake wood using concrete on a steel frame. Sculpting concrete has its limitations—it’s heavy, it’s brittle, and it slumps easily. She works in layers: a frame, concrete, more concrete, and finally, a sculpting coat of even more concrete. Her benches run approximately $1,500, with smaller end tables going for about $600. “I like to show, if it was really wood, how that craftsman would have cut the wood,” she says, adding that she sometimes sculpts using brushes with just two or three bristles to get the kind of detail she wants. She often adds touches like a nest and eggs perched atop the wood. The final step, acid staining to add color, takes a week to complete. The entire process is labor-intensive. “I’m very particular about it,” she says.“I feel like I’m painting watercolors in the dark… When you love something, you just keep going. It’s easy.”
Janet Sanders and John Leible
Perpetua Iron
When John Leible and Janet Sanders realized their then-employer, LeLu Metalcraft & Patio Shop, was folding, they opened Perpetua Iron in north St. Louis (314-753-1805, perpetuairon.com) and have been busy blacksmiths ever since. The son of an iron forger, Leible was born into the business; Sanders found ironwork through sculpture. Although they share all duties, she’s more closely involved in the initial design (and running the company), while Leible concentrates on fabrication. They create simple handrails and railings, intricately designed gates, fireplace screens, vent covers, mailboxes—whatever can be created out of 20-foot lengths of metal. The process is labor-intensive, something few outside of the business seem to realize. Fellow blacksmiths drop by to lament what Sanders calls their “wretched existence, but everyone loves making things. They’re very proud of what they do.” Sandersand Leible invite customers to come see their order being made. The more involved they get in the process, the happier they are with the outcome.“I’ve had a lady standing up on the table, looking down at the design of her railing,” Leible says. “She wanted to see it from above.”
Amanda Verbeck
Pele Prints
Master printer Amanda Verbeck juggles her personal work as a printmaker with running Pele Prints (314-750-7799, peleprints.com), the collaborative studio she started in 2006. Each artist is invited to the studio for about a week, working with Pele Prints to create a body of work that the artist and the studio then split fifty-fifty. Verbeck keeps busy with the studio, but she still finds time to create her art. “It’s often when I’m compelled to do so, meaning I have an idea that just won’t go away, so I have to,” she says. Compared to the larger collaborations that use presses up to 5 feet by 10 feet, Verbeck tends to create smaller, more intimate prints for her personal work. It has always incorporated health or science as a “constant theme,” noticeable in her series of prints showcasing pollen spores, cellular structures, and even hair follicles. She pores over medical journals and examines images from electron microscopes for inspiration. “I have ideas about the feel that I want it to have,” Verbeck says. From there, she chooses images, then creates a color scheme. She often adds handwork to her prints in another medium. Sometimes she paints, sometimes she draws, and sometimes she sculpts. Still, after 16 years, the print remains her focus. “The print is always the jumping-off point for me,” she says. “It’s sort of the common denominator.”
Retta Leritz
Retta le Ritz, LLC
Retta Leritz’s favorite new technology is Instagram. It connects her to the places that she would love to visit—if only she had the time. It also lets her easily scroll through inspiring designs and capture images that strike her fancy, which she then plasters all over bulletin boards, notebooks, and walls. What’s kept Leritz from traveling is the expansion of her stationery company, Retta le Ritz, LLC (314-963-3572, rettaleritz.com), to include chic, whimsical fabric designs. The fabrics, primarily cotton and silk, feature Leritz’s illustrations and are available this fall for purchase on her website. Suitable to use as drapery or for upholstery, the designs are colorful and intricate, but they tell a story. Leritz earned her bachelor of fine arts degree in interior design from Miami University of Ohio before working with fashion icons Betsey Johnson, Tommy Hilfiger, and Nicole Miller. “Literally everything I do is a reflection of myself on paper and fabric,” Leritz says. (She’s taught herself to be patient while she sketches out storylines. For example, one tells the visual tale of a twentysomething who always wears red shoes and travels to Asia by herself for the first time.) But for this line of fabrics, each collection will tell a complete story, not a mere snippet. “It’s fun to have my hand in so many pots,” she says. “This is just my next phase.”
Margaret von Kaenel
Murals and Decorative Finishes
Muralist Margaret von Kaenel (314-726-6392, mvk-decoart.com) calls her floor cloths—area rugs created out of canvas—a labor of love. The pieces are time-consuming, tedious, and at times a little stubborn. They also aren't as profitable as her wall murals, another medium she is known for. But as hand-painted floors rose in popularity, homeowners faced the problem of the artworks’ immobility. Von Kaenel solved that problem with her floor cloths. When she began exploring the world of interior design and her work as a muralist, she found it daunting to surmount her own reserve to become more socially involved in St. Louis’ artistic community. “The more you can be around people that are like you, the easier it becomes to express yourself to others not like you,” von Kaenel says. Her cloths are made of primed fabric brushed intricately with acrylic paint, which gives them a finish that’s sturdier underfoot and resists stains. “I am fully aware that people are living with the art I create,” she says. “I want it to besomething they want to keep forever.”
Sam Stang
Augusta Glass Studio
For Sam Stang, founder of Augusta Glass Studio (636-228-4732, samstang.com), glass blowing is about taking the traditional and spicing it up. Start with a shape, add pattern, add color, add contrast. A native of Minnesota, Stang came to St. Louis to study at Washington University. While attending the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine, he studied with the famous Venetian glass artist Lino Tagliapietra. Stang applied lessons learned there to his work fashioning original art here in St. Louis. He and his wife, Kaeko Maehata, both practice glass blowing at the studio, which Stang founded in 1992. Though they bounce ideas off of each other as husband and wife, they don’t usually tag-team projects. “My work is my work and her work is her work,” Stang says. Much like the glass he works with, Stang starts with a fluid idea that inspires him and transforms it into a solid creation. His creativity is sparked by designs he grew to love in nature and on century-old African trade beads, letting their patterns and colors influence his beautiful works of colored glassware. “I’m just making things that I like, and fortunately that other people like.”
