When a Door Closes, a Window Opens
It can be a Herculean task to clear out a business after 33 years, but that is what Bebe and Warren Johnson did last week as they said goodbye to the Race Lane storefront of Pritam & Eames to begin a semi-retirement based online and in a new showroom on Mount Desert Island, Me.
Not simply a task of wrapping and packing up boxes of the American Studio furniture that they helped define and create a market for since their store opened in 1981, the move was a time to invite the craftsmen they had worked with for decades to say goodbye and collect their consigned creations. One was on his way to meet them for lunch. Two canceled because the cross-sound ferries had shut down that day due to high surf and wind.
Boxes took the place of tables, chests, and benches. Floor space once dense with the work of Judy McKie, Andy Buck, Tim Coleman, David Ebner, and many others looked open and barren with a few pieces left by those artists and others still on view, and more under blankets or already cleared out.
While leaving their home away from home was surreal to them, growing up in the Midwest they may have found their future even more difficult to fathom. Mr. Johnson inherited his father’s own thwarted ambitions to be a lawyer. He pursued an undergraduate law degree and continued with graduate study of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston. Ms. Johnson, whom he met when they both attended college at the University of Illinois, studied communications at Boston University.
Seated next to each other in an undergraduate course on existentialism, “we were together from the beginning,” Ms. Johnson said during a break for coffee — strong, black, half decaf for both. After their graduate study in Boston, they moved to New York, where Ms. Johnson became director of Asian program operations at the Council on International Educational Exchange. Mr. Johnson tried his hand at business and international trade at what was Chase Manhattan at the time, but discovered filmmaking instead. “I was a square peg in a round hole or a round peg in a square hole, but either way, I realized I was not going to fit.”
Instead, he earned an M.F.A. in film at Columbia University and began making documentaries. The travel he sought through business came to him more easily with filmmaking in Taiwan, Nairobi, and the Arctic. Yet by the late 1970s, the couple were ready for something else.
They had already learned while working on a documentary at the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in Southern France that they could rely on each other and triumph over adversity no matter how challenging the circumstances. “It taught us that if we really believed in something, we could do it,” Mr. Johnson said. The film that resulted was distributed by Grove Press in the United States, and it left them with a hankering for self-employment.
At the same time, it dawned on them that they no longer wanted to live in New York City. Through friends, they had discovered Sag Harbor, and then found a run-down place in East Hampton to restore. Mr. Johnson continued commuting into the city for film projects, but he had also kept up the woodwork he learned from his grandfather as a child and retained an appreciation for a finely crafted and creative object.
Research and discussion with several people in the field convinced them that the market for second-generation American Craftsman furniture was ripe for development. This was a movement that had started with self-taught designers such as Sam Maloof and George Nakashima, continued through certain art schools after World War II, and is still vibrant today.
They developed a five-year plan on a spreadsheet and began visiting artists in 1980. “We walked into their studios just at the right time. It was a happy coincidence that we were looking for craftsmen at the time they were looking for someone like us,” Ms. Johnson said.
In May of 1981, they opened the store, which remained in the same location all these years, a testament to their success as well as the support of Leif Hope, their landlord at the old laundry building. “He probably didn’t understand it at the beginning, but he took a chance on us and has been amazingly supportive,” Mr. Johnson said, adding that he also encouraged them to “leap frog” into taking increasingly more space for the gallery.
Another local person who offered guidance was Jack Larsen. He encouraged them to offer smaller objects, telling them, “You can’t have people coming in two or three times without buying something.”
“It creates an uncomfortable distance between a potential buyer and seller,” according to Ms. Johnson. So they brought in jewelry and other smaller decorative objects.
They opened with a roster of artists who have remained with them as they continued to add more, including Mr. Ebner, Hank Gilpin, Thomas Hucker, Michael Hurwitz, Ms. McKie, Timothy Philbrick, and many others. From the beginning, “we had quite a number of curious East Hampton residents coming through the door,” Mr. Johnson said.
Over the years customers became clients, clients became collectors, and collectors became connoisseurs. But lately, “less and less people have been coming in, and that played a part in our consideration of closing,” Ms. Johnson said.
They agreed that the block the store stood on had changed with the arrival of the bank on the corner and that the people coming to East Hampton in recent years had changed, too. They were less interested in craft or unique designs.
Mr. Johnson, who had planned to retire to his woodshop a few years ago, had spent more time at the gallery recently as Ms. Johnson took an increasing role in outreach and conferences in their field. He will now get that break.
The couple will remain in East Hampton and maintain their website. Their inventory, as well as other consigned pieces, will be displayed in Maine by Tyra Hanson, who owns the Gallery at Somas Sound in Somesville.
The couple will take over the first floor of her two-floor space with objects they select under the Pritam & Eames name. They will organize special shows of furniture, paintings, and decorative objects for the summer of 2015 with an option to renew for 2016. Ms. Hanson, a protégée of the Johnsons, “made us an offer we couldn’t refuse,” Ms. Johnson said, with Ms. Hanson also handling the sales.
In addition to the artists they helped introduce through their gallery, the Johnsons produced a book, “Speaking of Furniture,” a kind of oral history of furniture designers associated with their store, published last year. The Furniture Society recognized their efforts in the field this year with its award of distinction.
Although they agreed that there is less appreciation among the public for the woodworking that is the backbone of the furniture they feature, Ms. Johnson said “it’s just fashion. It will come back. Everything is a cycle.”