Barlas Baylar in The Spotlight

Pioneering lighting for the future

Famous New York furniture designer Barlas Baylar is widely acclaimed for his minimalist works that integrate natural elements with modern aesthetics.  To tour his Hudson Furniture showrooms is to walk through a world where nature has been reinterpreted 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 reworked for the furnishing of civilization.  The soft curves of chain chandeliers are traced by metallic piping that lead to a descent of light through strands of glass.  Expiring trees are memorialized in bittersweet majesty as the solid slabs of chairs and benches.  Then there are those accessories which appear at once stone and wood – petrified wood, it turns out to be.  Yet all these floor samples only start to suggest the bustle at Baylar’s prodigious workshop.

Twenty-four craftsmen help transmute his visions into the utilitarian artwork now fashionable with celebrity apartments and upscale boutiques alike, each piece unique and no two quite the same.  With personal experiences in production design and a family tradition in machinery manufacturing, Baylar founded Hudson Furniture to incorporate antique, all-natural materials, modernizing them with industrial details that make for transformative organic structures which suggest exteriors from their interior settings.  For example, their surfaces are not simply sanded down but hand-burnished with broken glass to reveal nature’s own workmanship beneath.

Devotion to nature inspires not only Baylar’s designs but his whole way of working.  Not merely some detached admirer from afar, he is deeply involved in the preservation of nature and only uses certifiably sustainable materials in his work.  Arbor salvaged from wind and storm damage that is domestically sourced is used exclusively and extensively, with favorite species such as Claro Walnut, Black Walnut, Myrtle, Jasmine, Acacia, Satinwood, and Ebonized Pine only removed by their rightful owners in order to prevent damage to houses or other trees.  Nothing is to be wasted, with scraps and leftovers of every irregularity integrated into new works.  And from the connections made through family ties and personal knowledge of various industries, Baylar can ascertain for himself the proper origins of his materials, with even the official approval of embassies and consulates sought when necessary imports are involved.  In fact, he is proud that Hudson Furniture is New York City’s sole repository of legally harvested petrified wood.  In this way his geometric designs, traditional joinery techniques, and hand-rubbed oil finishes shall continue returning to nature, only to emerge once more in the form of the furnishings that clothe civilization.