Designing Barlas Baylar

A Life, A Vision

Renowned New York designer Barlas Baylar is widely recognized for minimalist furniture that integrate natural elements with modern aesthetics.  To tour his Hudson Furniture showrooms is to walk through a world where nature has been re-imagined by architecture, as if the 21st Century were pining for millennia past.  Here the evolution of chandeliers, tables, bed frames and their headboards is on exhibit in the form of metal, wood, glass, and stone reinterpreted for the furnishing of civilization.  The soft curves of chain chandeliers are traced by metallic accenting that follow a descent of light through strands of glass.  The bittersweet majesty of expiring trees are memorialized in the solid slabs of seats.  Then there are those accessories which seem stone and wood all at the same time – petrified wood, it turns out to be.  Yet all these floor samples only begin to suggest the bustle of Baylar’s prodigious workshop.

Twenty-four craftsmen help transmute his visions into the utilitarian artwork now popular with celebrity apartments and upscale boutiques alike, each piece unique and no two quite the same.  Out of personal experiences in production design and a family tradition in machinery manufacturing, Hudson Furniture was established by Baylar to incorporate antique, all-natural materials, modernized with industrial details, to create transformative organic structures that can suggest exteriors from their interior settings.  For example, their surfaces are not simply sanded down but burnished by hand – with broken glass – to uncover nature’s own underlying handicraft.

Devotion to our natural world inspires not only Baylar’s designs but his very manner of work.  No simple admirer from afar, he is deeply committed to the preservation of nature, using only certifiably sustainable materials for his works.  Arbor salvaged from wind and storm damage is used exclusively and extensively, with care taken to sure their domestic sourcing.  Preferred varieties like Claro Walnut, Black Walnut, Myrtle, Jasmine, Acacia, Satinwood, and Ebonized Pine are removed by their rightful owners only to prevent damage to houses or other trees.  Nothing is left behind and wasted; scraps and leftovers of every irregularity are integrated into new designs.  And through the connections established of family ties and personal knowledge in various industries, Baylar is able to ascertain for himself the proper origins of his materials, gaining even the official approval of foreign embassies and consulates when necessary imports are involved.  Indeed, he is proud that Hudson Furniture is New York City’s sole repository for legally harvested petrified wood.  In this fashion will his geometric designs, traditional joinery techniques, and hand-rubbed oil finishes continue to return to nature, emerging again in time to form the furnishings necessary to civilization.