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apartment therapy saving the world, one room at a time

The Hunted House is a great furniture store on the 14th St NW strip. Located on the second floor of an old townhouse, the store is arranged in mini tableaus of mid-century modern furniture. The small staged rooms really help display some great pieces of furniture. It almost feels like you are in someone’s living room – a very hip person’s living room...

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Before You Have a Seat, Take a Stand
He Says: 'Cool!' She Says: 'Cool It!' Can Modern Love Survive a Tale of Two Chairs?

By Monica Hesse

Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 4, 2007; Page M06

On Sunday afternoons on 14th Street, up by the art galleries, barrel chairs are like a litmus or Rorschach test for couples who just moved in together and are buying furniture. There are a lot of these couples in Washington.

"You know what they look like?" Annette Schulz asks. Along with her fiance, she is shopping for a lamp in a somewhat hip vintage furniture store called Hunted House. It's the kind of store where somewhat hip people with fiances buy furniture. "It's like someone took a trashy 1970s car seat, maybe one used in a porn film -- or not a porn film, but at least in 'Magnum P.I.,' you know, Tom Selleck with the mustache -- and then just put it together with a pirate movie. That's what they make me think of."

If the barrel chairs are ugly, they are ugly in such a surpassing way that they may, in fact, be hideous. They may be so hideous that they become their own personality quiz:

Q: What kind of person are you?

A: The kind of person who would buy these chairs.

Then again, they may not be ugly, they may be something else, but very something else.

They are made of barrels, so mocking them could be as easy as shooting fish in them.

The mid-20th century upholstery is vinyl -- black, covered in harlequin diamonds of red, orange, teal, russet, gray, white, emerald and lemon. Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Chair. The legs are stubby. The seat swivels.

My boyfriend loves them. In a desperate attempt to understand why, I bring in a second opinion in the form of a Dad visiting from Denver. Dad sees the chairs, says, "Holy Mother of God, those are really ugly chairs." So Mark Johnson, the owner of the store, comes over. "Ohh, you're from Denver. Yeah, I can see how these chairs might not work in Denver. In New York or Los Angeles, yeah, but not Denver."

Dad's like, don't go dumping on Denver. He says: "These would totally sell in Denver. Daughter, buy the chairs." I don't. If they are still there by the boyfriend's birthday in December, I will.

Hunted House has cool stuff. Like a three-cushion Danish modern sofa in cheerful plaid. A crushed-velvet lounger in buttery gold. A mint-condition tiki bar with matching stools. It also has two barrel chairs.

Let's say that barrel chairs are "a taste." Once, cultured people had good taste and everyone else had bad. Then philosophers came up with aesthetic relativism, which says that the assessment of beauty is relative to individuals, cultures and contexts, so everyone had to shut up about everyone else's taste and even invent a phrase ("there's no accounting for taste") to keep the peace when it came to things like barrel chairs. Taste is like coffee: Everyone knows someone who makes bad coffee, but miraculously, no one is that person.

Things can qualify as good taste if they are vintage.

Vintage in the dictionary means "of old, recognized, and enduring interest, importance, or quality." Vintage turns a barrel chair into "a piece." As in, "This is a vintage piece." Vintage pieces transcend tackiness, kitschiness and the category that made Susan Sontag famous: camp. Vintage would put these barrel chairs at the same level as wearing Converse All-Stars and Buddy Holly glasses -- if only one knew for sure that they were vintage, and not just barrel chairs. Lesser doubts have doomed 14th Street relationships.

The inter-couple psychodynamics also include guilt, as in the emotion felt when one of them has already agreed to throw out the plastic bar stools, the two dumpster-dived Barcaloungers and the mini-fridge to make room for the other one's stuff, and all that's asked in return is the willingness to spend $350 for a pair of barrel chairs.

Taste, guilt and barrel chairs are beasts preying on couples shopping on 14th Street. Perhaps they should seek counseling from Jennifer Marshall, a Stanford art history professor who specializes in 20th-century American aesthetics. Marshall listens to a description of the chairs. She says they sound like they were "made in a home workshop . . . completing the picture of a guy's dream den." She says the chairs may be part of the Do-It-Yourself age. In such cases the very garishness of an object is what makes it appealing.

After seeing a photograph of the chairs, she states: "Okay. Those are pretty ugly." Then again, she doesn't have to live with a man who loves them.

A bit of history: Way back in the days of basement workshops and crosscut handsaws, people used to make barrel chairs. The Giant Home Workshop Manual from 1941 has a full-page spread of an aproned man working away at one. The finished product is a squat piece of floral-fabric furniture that looks like it might head-butt you.

Then furniture companies started making them, like Kentucky Brothers Furniture, which made these chairs. Johnson bought them for Hunted House at an auction outside of York, Pa.

There were four of them but he bought only two, because one was in bad shape and things sell better in even numbers.

He knows the agony of couples shopping for furniture.

He once watched a couple come in every weekend looking at blond teak nesting tables. He wanted them. She didn't. Well, she did, but only if they could be stripped down and repainted, which he thought defeated the purpose.

It was always sort of sad, says Johnson, to see them never agree.

So they came in every weekend until one week the tables had just been sold and the new owner happened to be waiting outside for his partner to arrive with a truck.

"I was kind of glad the couple arrived when they did," says Johnson. "So they could see how easy it is to just buy some goddamn tables."

The couple said farewell to the tables. Then they went inside and quickly bought an ottoman.

"I was kind of glad the couple arrived when they did," says Johnson. "So they could see how easy it is to just buy some goddamn tables."

The couple said farewell to the tables. Then they went inside and quickly bought an ottoman.

And now, on a Sunday afternoon, that time when recently cohabited couples look at vintage pieces and feel two relative tastes colliding, Suzi Emmerling is sitting in one of the barrel chairs.

Emmerling just moved in with Mike Brennan, and they are on a very tight budget, but they'd still like a sofa, because there comes a point where it stops being okay to use a futon as your main couch.

So they can't afford the barrel chairs, but Emmerling is willing to give an honest assessment of them, which is that they look farmhouse-chic, or make her think of those bougie women who have special themed rooms, like "Navajo."

But they're not bad, nothing like the yellow soap dish in which Brennan keeps his spare change.

"Last night I finally turned to him and said, 'You know what, I don't like this.' "

"I said, 'You just now decided you don't like it?' " says Brennan.

"And I said, 'No, I just now got up the nerve to tell you I don't like it.' "

They both sit back into barrel chairs, and reflect.

"Five years ago I would have hated myself for caring about furniture," says Emmerling. "But suddenly it seems so much more important. I don't know why . . . Hey, I feel like I'm in therapy. It's kind of nice how the chair cradles you. The swiveling is good for nervous habits. I actually love these chairs."

But they may not be hers to love much longer. A few days after that Sunday afternoon, Johnson says, a man came into Hunted House. He was newly single, recuperating from a rough cohabitation that had included Ikea sofas. This new phase in his life would be marked by barrel chairs, he decided, and he told Johnson, "It's really nice, not having to clear the stuff I buy through my girlfriend." He hasn't decided whether he wants to lay out that kind of money for barrel chairs, but it's nice to know that he can.

Openings
A Low-Rent Space That Carries High-Impact Goods
Thursday, July 12, 2007; Page H02

Mark Johnson, co-owner of the Hunted House in Northwest Washington, is the first to acknowledge the shop is "this shabby little space with low rent." But that is precisely why he and partner Ed Rudock can sell mid-century modern and art deco furniture, lamps, art and accessories so reasonably in a warren of second-story rooms, he says.

The most interesting piece is a $365 wooden bar made for a corner. Slide back tambour doors and pull out hidden storage, half of it for liquor bottles, half for glassware. Other items include three matched Lane occasional tables for $425, two turquoise and green ceramic lamps with wood trim and nubby shades for $280, eight highball glasses in a silver caddy for $35 and a wood-grain laminate dinette table with six orange vinyl chairs, $385.

On a recent visit, several chairs were labeled "Eames era," though there wasn't a real Charles and Ray Eames creation in sight. That's fine with customers, Johnson says. "We have a lot of younger people on their first and second apartments who can't afford to spend any more, or people in the new condos who want to mix in our pieces with their more expensive things."

The store is at 1830 1/2 14th St. NW. For more information, call 202-549-7493 or click on http://www.huntedhousedc.com.

Annie Groer

WASHINGTONIAN MAGAZINE

August 6th, 2006
First Look: Hunted House

Fourteenth Street’s transformation into a furniture-store district continues with the opening of Hunted House, a vintage retailer that specializes in modern and art deco pieces from the 1920s to the 1970s.

Owner Mark Johnson, who used to be former DC Council Chair Linda Cropp’s press secretary, has long collected furniture. His hobby grew from outfitting his Columbia Heights house to selling pieces on Craigslist to running a stand at Eastern Market. When fire tore through Eastern Market in April, Johnson’s loyal following encouraged him to start his own shop.

The store, which opened two months ago, looks more like a rickety old house than a furniture store—and that’s the idea. “As opposed to a big open showroom, it feels like an actual house,” says Johnson. “It helps people visualize what the furniture might look like in their own home.” Rooms are stocked with pieces Johnson finds at auctions and estate sales. Recent items have included a retro dinette set with six chairs ($450), a set of four Eames-era chairs with red padding ($200), and a tricolor ceramic lamp ($100).

By Mary Clare Fleury

Wednesday, July 7, 2007
Furniture finds a natural setting — and new life — at 14th St. store

Overstuffed couches and armchairs hunker down with wooden accent tables and modern lamps inside the Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams showroom on 14th Street, the trendy furniture district near Logan Circle. The “Instant Antiques” and “French Flea Market” lines of club chairs otherwise destined for Crate & Barrel, Pottery Barn and Williams Sonoma fill the
8,000-square-foot space, once a Cadillac dealership.

Three blocks up 14th Street, one-month-old Hunted House furniture shop is the showroom’s polar opposite.

“That’s a typical furniture store,” Hunted House owner Mark Johnson said of Mitchell Gold, which opened in May. “But here, it’s different,” he said, gesturing to the mid-century modern pieces populating what looks to be a row-house apartment at 1830 1/2 14th St. NW.

Johnson, who lives a few blocks away, said the space is similar to his house and to the apartments and condos his customers live in.“

... this is how people live, obviously, so we just put furniture in it the way it would look in their house,” he said. “[Customers] already get a sense of what it’s going to look like when they take it home. And I think that helps a lot, frankly.”

“Yeah, it looks more like an apartment,” said shopper Brianne Mitchell, who is furnishing her 10th and U streets apartment. “It looks cool, because it’s, like, furniture in its natural setting.”

“It’s more authentic,” agreed Mitchell’s friend Benji Russell.

A former press secretary and lobbyist, Johnson opened the store a month ago with interior designer Ed Rudock after the two spent years filling their house on Clifton Street with mid-century modern pieces.

“It just became kind of overfilled with furniture,” said Johnson, who grew up with this type of furnishing — “Didn’t everybody?” — but claims his love for it is not based on nostalgia but on the sleekness of the design. “And we liked buying the stuff so much, we liked collecting it, and people seemed to really take a shine to it, so our house really became like a store.”

The two had some success selling pieces on Craigslist and at Eastern Market. “We did well
enough there to think that we could be onto something here,” said Johnson. “So I got a business license, you know, did all the stuff that you have to do to make it legal, and started shopping around for spaces.”

They ended up on 14th Street, among the 12 other furniture shops Johnson counted in the immediate area, and above a thrift store in what was formerly a vintage furniture and knickknack shop.

Johnson, who grew up in Adams Morgan, has had a bird’s-eye view of the change 14th Street has undergone in the last few years.

“It’s great what’s happened here, but it’s not the same neighborhood. When I was a small kid, this was ... sort of the hub of black Washington ... . As U Street turned into Florida Avenue, that’s where blacks lived and that’s where they shopped,” said Johnson, who is black. “But I think people who move here now don’t have any idea about that. “

... I mean, you know, change happens,” he continued. “I think there are good things about it, and I think there are things that aren’t so good about it. I think what’s happened in this neighborhood really is progress,” he said, “but ... I also see that there were some issues that a lot of people [new to the area] may not see.”

Ultimately, said Johnson, he is pleased that, among other things, changes in the neighborhood have produced a clientele for furniture like his. “Because 14th and U has become what it is, I can have this shop here, and I can actually have people who are interested in this stuff who have the money to spend on it.

“And, you know, this is just a new life for this old neighborhood ... ,” he said. “I guess that’s kind of like a metaphor for this shop, because this is a new life for this old furniture. And I think of this as kind of cool. I think other people do, too.”

Johnson said he is not threatened by large stores like Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams; the more furniture stores in the area, the more foot traffic for Hunted House, he said.

And he’s betting that customers of Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams will be pleasantly surprised by what Hunted House has to offer. Mark Johnson opened his store last month.

“I defy you to find a furniture style today that doesn’t copy from this period. I mean, anywhere you go, to Ikea, you go to West Elm, you go to Pottery Barn, you go to any of those places, what you’re going to see is this stuff,” said Johnson.

He said his first month has been a good one. “I don’t think anybody’s expected to feel like the business is going to break the bank the first month, but I have to say, it’s been a pretty good month.

“ ... I mean, if nobody else comes in here and shops again, you know, I would really feel bad about that. I would hate it, in fact,” he continued. “But I still would like the fact that I took the gamble of trying to start my own thing, because it’s not the easiest thing to do. But when you do it, you feel really good about it.”

1350 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW - Room 106, Washington, DC 20004
202.724.8058 main - 202.724.8023 fax - jackevans@dccouncil.us
Monday, July 09, 2007

Vintage furniture store opens along 14th Street corridor

The revival of the 14th Street corridor continues as Hunted House, a vintage furniture store, recently opened at 1830½ 14th Street, NW. This corridor, which boasts the likes of Mitchell Gold, Vastu and Muleh, now plays host to a vintage retailer offering furniture, lighting and home accessories.

"The need for value-priced furniture is very important to residents across the city. I believe merchants must offer goods at a price point that is reasonable," Councilmember Evans said. "Just as we ask for affordable housing within the scope of a development, we must also ask merchants to offer goods and services that are reasonable. Kudos to Mark and Ed for opening in Ward 2 and offering a great deal on vintage furniture."

Hunted House is a case of accidental birth. Ed Rudock, an interior design professional had a true love for furniture having sold it for many years. Mark Johnson, a collector of Art Deco and Mid Century furniture, knew others loved vintage furniture, but wanted to find it at affordable prices. With Mark's eye for period pieces and Ed's knowledge of furniture and design, the two started buying select vintage furniture. With a loyal following and by word of mouth, Ed and Mark's business graduated from Craigslist and DC's Eastern Market to their current location on 14th Street, NW.

For more information, visit Hunted House at 1830 ½ 14th Street, NW, call 549-7493 or contact Evans' Logan Circle liaison, Sean Metcalf.

_{http://www.dccouncil.washington.dc.us/EVANS/newsletter/Week.of.06.29.07.htm#HUNTEDHOUSE}

apartment therapy saving the world, one room at a time

Before You Have a Seat, Take a Stand He Says: 'Cool!' She Says: 'Cool It!' Can Modern Love Survive a Tale of Two Chairs?

Openings A Low-Rent Space That Carries High-Impact Goods Thursday, July 12, 2007; Page H02

Before You Have a Seat, Take a Stand
He Says: 'Cool!' She Says: 'Cool It!' Can Modern Love Survive a Tale of Two Chairs?

Openings
A Low-Rent Space That Carries High-Impact Goods
Thursday, July 12, 2007; Page H02