"The Taste-Maker: Murray moss Takes His Store-Cum-Museum to L.A."
Cont. (Page 2 of 4)
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"I believe in a totally manipulated experience," says Moss. "When I collaborate with my display guys, we talk about narrative, text, and moments. It's the reason I locked things behind glass--it was to create a proscenium, to slow the experience down. If you see something you need to have, the case is unlocked. It doesn't matter if it's a unique $tk vase by [Italian furniture designer] Gaetano Pesce commissioned by me or a $3 bottle opener. The glass is there not only to protect my display, my 'text,' from people moving things around, but to make you interact with a person--a salesman--to make your experience even better.
"If people want to come to our store, they are signing up for an experience," he continues. "This is why we keep the temperature freezing cold. I don't want it to be comfortable. I want you to be awake. If you want to just find out where the candlesticks are, the store doesn't work. I don't think people want to be asked 'What do you want?' I think people want to be told 'Let me show you something.' This is why I very purposely had the store designed so that you cannot see any of the objects from the street. All of the cases are turned away from the street, so you can see only the one object that I put in the window. To me the other design shops are bookshops with printed scripts of plays. My shop is like a theater with live performance."
At one point, about 10 years ago, Moss and Getchell even asked their sales force to use pseudonyms. "We had a sign near the door: Please be advised that all Moss employees are working under assumed names," Getchell recalls.
"It occurred to me to follow through with the theatrical metaphor," says Moss. "The salesperson is playing a part. We'd tell them, 'You need a costume.' For example, 'If you were a person who was representing Meissen, what would you wear? What would you need from your costume in order to have the authority to play your role?' I don't specifically tell them what to wear--though I do hate leisure suits."
"They are called track suits," Getchell says, interrupting him.
"Whatever," says Moss. "I discourage that. I don't want my people to be trendy, because we are perceived first and foremost as a trendy place. They don't have to wear badges."
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Moss and Getchell come by the theatrical comparisons honestly; they both trained as actors. "We met onstage," says Getchell, "in 1972, when we were both members of a Shakespeare company performing The Taming of the Shrew in London." When they returned to the States, they went to work in the stock company of the Theater for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut.
Getchell, 58, grew up on a potato farm in Limestone, Maine, went to Harvard, and, after quitting the stage, had a successful career as a TV producer. From tk to tk he was the C.E.O. of the Sesame Street division of the Children's Television Workshop.
"They hated him so much," Moss tells me. "It was horrible. He fired many of them. He fired the deaf one."
"Yes, I fired Linda Bove [who played Linda the librarian]," Getchell admits.
"I was so unpopular that they made a joke muppet of me, called Skippy, vice-president of Hideous Change." It has long been whispered that Moss and Getchell were the models for two other muppets: Ernie and Bert. Quote TK. Moss, tk, was raised in Chicago. His father owned a factory that produced medical and dental x-ray machines. Murray's twin sister, Fern Moss Simon, who owns a design store called Arts 220, located outside of Chicago--she opened her store a decade before he opened his--says that industrial design runs in their blood. "We grew up playing in our father's factory, so machinery was very familiar and benign to us. Technology was our god. Our father believed in progress. He had one of the first computers. We had electric typewriters years before anyone else did, and we had to learn to use them."
The TK Moss children grew up in a very progressive design environment, colored by shades of You Can't Take It with You. "My parents built their dream house when I was about nine," says Murray Moss. "My father had strong ideas about how it should be customized. For example, he insisted on a foot-pedal-operated drinking fountain in the dining room. He thought bringing glasses to the table and then taking them away and washing them was a waste. So you would get up from the table, go drink from the fountain--it had pedals for hot and cold--and then come back to the table. My mother and the decorator, whose name was William Miller, hated this. My parents had fights, so finally the compromise was to hide the fountain in a fake grove of kumquat trees."
As Moss talks about his childhood home, the origins of his unique vision of the design world become clear: "My father, mother, and Miller wanted total control over the household environment. When my father wanted to augment the lamplight in the room, and at that time recessed lighting was not standard--he drilled holes in the ceilings and wired it himself. In the bathrooms, he had four soap dispenses and hot-air hand dryers. My mother and Miller hated this, so she had the hand dryers enameled in colors to match the wallpaper--blue, yellow, pink. Every time we gave one another a gift, it had to be approved by the decorator, and we all went along with that. It seemed normal to us. My mother really kept up with Miller's rules. To the end, she matched the foil wrappers of the hard candy to the color of the amoeba-shaped chrome candy dish. We used to have to go to a special store to get these perfectly wrapped candies."
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