Heywood-Wakefield revisited.

Streamline Moderne furniture group returns under the same label, with new manufacturers, and looks as great as ever.

Now and then a beautiful, well-crafted style of furniture falls from grace, and is undeservedly forgotten. This probably tells us more about the society that used it, then tossed it aside, than it does about the quality of the furniture itself. But fortunately, there are still antique dealers and furniture collectors who look beyond fads and fashions. They can contemplate bare and battered old bones and perceive something wonderful. Leonard Riforgiato is such a person, and you will hear about him shortly, but first, a bit of history.

The year was 1826. John Quincy Adams was President. The Erie Canal, the most spectacular engineering achievement of the young republic, had opened just one year earlier. America was on the move.

In this auspicious time, Walter Heywood of Gardner, Mass., with optimism in heart and woodworking tools in hand, stepped into the old barn out back and began to make simple wood chairs. Ten years later, after a fire destroyed the barn, he and his brothers, Levi, Benjamin and William, moved into an abandoned woodworking shop and continued to build chairs.

Heywood Brothers Co. expanded and flourished with the development of interchangeable chair parts, long production runs and advanced machine technology, and the ability to move goods farther and faster by steamboat. One hundred years later, in 1926, the business known as the Heywood-Wakefield Co. had more than 5,000 employees and was the nation's largest manufacturer of wood chairs, wicker furniture and baby carriages.

First for the masses

During the great Depression, the company hired some of the country's foremost industrial designers, including Russel Wright, Gilbert Rohde, Leo Jiranek and Count Alexis de Sakhnoffsky, to create new furniture lines using the latest machinery. These designers were modernists who popularized the streamlined look and confirmed that quality furniture could be produced on the production line.

Heywood-Wakefield's Streamline Moderne rejected surface decoration, combining solid hardwood with sleek but simple lines, rounded corners and light finishes. In production, with variations, for almost 20 years, it was the first "Moderne" furniture for the mass market. Many consider the versions from the late 1940s and early 1950s the apogee of moderne style.

After 1960, the design fell out of favor and business declined. Labor disputes also took their toll and in 1979, the out-dated factory closed its doors. Heywood-Wakefield, the nation's oldest continuously operating company, was declared bankrupt in 1980.

Valued by collectors

It was the growing zeal of collectors that opened Leonard Riforgiato's eyes to the possibility of reviving the line of blond furniture from the company that had gone out of business after 153 years. Riforgiato's South Beach Furniture Co. bought, restored and sold antique furniture, and he says, "Every time I picked up a piece of Streamline Moderne, everyone wanted to buy it." A network of Midwest dealers found vintage pieces for him, but as the furniture's popularity snowballed with collectors, his sources dried up.

"I wanted to bring back a line of furniture that I absolutely loved," Riforgiato says. "I have been crazy about Heywood-Wakefield since the first time it caught my eye - the style, the light wood, its sense of stability." He is not a furniture designer, but as a collector and antiques dealer, Riforgiato is sensitive to design.

Because he had spent years taking the furniture apart, restoring and refinishing it, Riforgiato knew exactly how each piece was engineered - and he had one of every original piece in his Miami home to use as a model. Acquiring a partner (Andrew Capitman, an investment banker), the Heywood-Wakefield name and logo, and manufacturing and marketing capabilities were the next logical steps.

In January 1994, South Beach acquired the name and logo, and is now doing business as Heywood-Wakefield Co. of Miami. Retailers handling the product are an impressive lot which includes: ABC Carpet & Home, Manhattan; Gabbert's, Minneapolis; Klingman, Grand Rapids; Richard Honquest, Chicago; and Porters' of Racine.

Seeking a not-so-new manufacturing facility

The partners looked around North Carolina for a manufacturing facility, but most plants they visited were light years ahead of the type of operation they were seeking. For example, no one they spoke to steam bent chair backs any longer. F.W. Lombard Co., whom they finally found to produce the new Streamline Moderne dining room tables and chairs, is located in Gardner, Mass., four miles from the original Heywood-Wakefield facility. Lombard also owns the steambending equipment from the old plant.

However, three North Carolina companies are involved in producing the line. Bradco Wood Products, a high-end sample maker, builds occasional tables and desks, as well as exposed wood frames of Biscayne club chairs and sofas. Liz & Co. finishes the furniture in an amber color developed by Sherwin-Williams. Jarrett Bros. is developing a motion recliner chair and a lift-out sofa with streamline double horizontal arm and rear-side moulding of wood.

The new Heywood-Wakefield Streamline Moderne line includes armchairs, side chairs, round and drop-leaf dining tables, occasional tables, a desk and a writing table, sofas and lounge chairs. Works in progress are the Sculptura bedroom suite and the Bubble glass buffet. Wood is solid northern yellow birch.

'As good as ever'

"The revival furniture is as good as it ever was, add in some cases, even better," Riforgiato says. "Construction-wise, we have done everything to make it as close to the original as possible, including the use of pan-head Phillips wood screws and tempered hinges on the drop leaves." Five-, 6- and 7-inch boards still make up tabletops. The wide boards are stabilized with a cleat system like the original.

The only changes, Riforgiato said, were to create larger coffee tables and to devise stronger leg mounts for dining tables. The vintage butterfly table has curved legs that slid into a stump in which a hole was bored and a peg was pounded. The new assembly has a two-part metal clip to which the leg is attached and glued.

Yankee ingenuity is still alive and kicking in New England, Riforgiato declares. "The F.W. Lombard Co. manages to stay right on top of things. Those guys could get lots of easier jobs than ours. Yet they put up with an enormous amount of fuss from me. I hang around the factory for days, bothering them, and insisting that everything be exact," he adds.

Leonard Riforgiato, ardent furniture collector turned antique dealer turned restorer turned entrepreneur, now seeks an experienced case goods manufacturer with an older factory, to produce the Sculptura bedroom furniture series first introduced in 1955, and other case goods.

No CNC or 32mm equipment required.