Zalduondo's zeal: The furniture designer has turned her talents to a salon in the Design District

BY JENNY STALETOVICH
Gayle Zalduondo is a sculptor, who became a hot furniture maker, who became a CEO.
So it’s no wonder she’s ready to try something bigger. After 20 years of running a boutique furniture company in Miami, Zalduondo is leaving her wholesale niche and opening a salon that’s sort of a hybrid version of a store and a think tank.


It’s a tricky endeavor, even Zalduondo admits. Her metal furniture has become ubiquitous, carried by Crate & Barrel, Pottery Barn, Ethan Allen and other major retailers. She’s also been featured in The New York Times and twice won the top award from the American Society of Furniture Designers. But her company, Urbanus Inc., remains largely unknown outside the trade.
”The national furniture industry knows us, but nobody else does,” she said. “We were laughing the other day, saying we’re a start-up with 20 years of experience.”
To start with, Zalduondo did something unorthodox in the furniture world: She shut down her High Point, N.C., showroom this year. She told her customers that if they wanted to see her lines, they’d need to come to a slightly seedy street in midtown Miami where her warehouse occupies a former Nabisco factory.
Then, because sometimes when you’re on a roll it’s hard to stop, she decided to delegate manufacturing to a trusted vendor in Alabama, sell the 30,000-square-foot Miami warehouse and focus on a new salon one-fifth the size. She plans to open the salon in Miami’s Design District in the fall. There, she says, she can host charrettes on design, get her ear to the ground and feed her creative soul.
If it all sounds a little out-there, Zalduondo is the first to admit she’s still working on the details. Her guiding mantra is that good design is rooted in inspiration and inspiration comes from living. She doesn’t want to get bigger. She wants to get more effective. She wants a retail store so that it can be her lab, but she’s not giving up her loyal wholesale customers.
She wants to do interior designs and recently set up a vignette at the Boulevard, a 16-story condominium at Northeast 34th Street and Biscayne Boulevard, and is designing a Miami Beach salon for a friend.
She also wants to fill what she perceives as a gap in the furniture industry: pieces that go beyond beauty and quality, that have meaning. One more thing: She’s doing sculpture again and created an installment that coincided with last year’s Art Basel.
”The whole strategy of the new thing is a think tank and salon and being who you are in the local community and having influence,” she said. “What our ideas are, that’s who we are. And that’s something I’ve been questioning. If you live in your passion, you’re happy.”
Zalduondo has one other thing to juggle: motherhood. She and her husband, Andrew Kelly, have three children, ages 6, 11 and 13.
Furniture as art is nothing new. Great furniture makers like George Nakashima or Aero Saarinen had their roots in architecture, not carpentry. But in today’s fierce market — Modernage just last month announced that it was closing its Florida stores after more than 60 years — diving into the retail market and focusing on design over the bottom line can be a daring move.
MASS APPEAL
Many successful designers, explained Thelma Lazo-Flores, chair of the furniture design department at Savannah College of Art and Design, produce mass appeal lines to subsidize their more risky designs.
”The common perception is that the furniture design industry is just sometimes cruising on a copy-and-paste syndrome,” Lazo-Flores said. “Not many are taking risks in developing new innovative lines or approaches in the use of materials that will change the design landscape, aesthetic sense or even re-shape the American design culture.”
Zalduondo grew up in Coral Gables, the daughter of a developer, and attended Carrollton School of the Sacred Heart in Coconut Grove. She dabbled in photography at the University of Florida but found the space defined by a lens too confining. So she enrolled in fine art classes, met professor Geoffrey Naylor, a sculptor, and in the early 1980s saw a New York show by Ellsworth Kelly. Suddenly, everything made sense.
”I was so mesmerized. I knew that was the direction I wanted to take,” she said.
Her first commission after graduating with a degree in sculpture came from a Gainesville developer who wanted a metal water feature. Then a friend opened a Puerto Rican restaurant and needed furniture, so Zalduondo took the welder and paint gun her father had given her for graduation, made some pieces, and soon had an order for 140 tables and chairs.
PARTNER, HUSBAND
By then she’d met her future husband, who was working in real estate and quickly became her business partner.
Orders came from a second and third cafe. Then her parents sent her a Miami Herald article about a 1987 Miami design competition. Zalduondo and her partner, Kelly, entered, won and 10 months later sent the same pieces to the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York. There they sold about $10,000 worth of furniture in a single day and met the product manager for Crate & Barrel, who immediately ordered a metal Shaker-style table.
Urbanus was quickly born. With money they made themselves and sometimes borrowed from Zalduondo’s dad, Arthur, who for the first few years sat in on their weekly management meetings, the couple started making furniture. Zalduondo also spent a year working as a buyer with a local furniture store to learn the trade.
Over the years, she has stayed close to her sculptural training. Many of her pieces have exacting lines. Small ”personal” tables are made out of single sheet of metal folded like origami. Using copper tops, she discovered how to add patinas that give pattern and depth. She also learned a trick to making metal warm: Bend a carbon steel table into soft shapes, like cabriolet legs.
”They’re a wonderful blend of practical items with a beautiful artistic sensibility,” said Vicki Lang, a spokeswoman for Crate & Barrel, whose stores became known for providing good design to the masses. ”They’re functional and they’re beautiful shapes, but they’re also very practical, which is a wonderful thing to offer our customers,” Lang said.
It should come as no surprise that Zalduondo, whose favorite designers include Barbara Barry and Edward Wormley, sees the Renaissance as her favorite period.
”You know how I describe it? It’s living artfully and that includes taste and smell and how things are experienced and that can’t be copied. That has to be experienced,” she said. “I obviously don’t identify with being a furniture maker.”
What she is is a designer who sees life in patterns and shapes, who can read a book about politics and art between the early 1900s and 1945 and come up with a table, who thinks that making and selling beautiful things can be a noble cause because those things just might make someone happy.
Her salon, she hopes, will create a place where these ideas can come together, where designers can overlook the competitive nature of their trade and instead share ideas. These types of salons have started in England and Japan, but other than college campuses, remain relatively scarce in the U.S., Lazo-Flores said.
”We need to continue to create furniture networks which would encourage cross-pollination of ideas, voice new concerns and affect some directional changes in the field,” Laso-Florez said.
When all is said and done, what Zalduondo hopes for is more an artistic, than a business, expansion.
”I think we’re on to something pretty big,” she said. “The think tank, being involved in the architectural community and the design community and having monthly charrettes. Can you imagine that in a design community like this? That is adding value not just for Urbanus, but for the community. For everybody.”