No Markdowns on Their Work

HAMDEN, Conn. — By the time he was 45, Murray Moss had worked as a mime, an actor in an experimental theater troupe (he once performed a three-act play folded inside a cardboard box), a gallery assistant and a fashion retailer, among other careers. He had the face of a monk, the obsessive autodidacticism of a collector and a habit of speaking in fulsome paragraphs.

He was compulsively tidy. He loved Italian factories. And by extension, Italian product design, which he studied with typical zeal using an elaborate system of index cards, shelter magazines and data gleaned from four years impersonating design editors to gain access to European trade shows. After a trial run selling Alessi steel ware and Ettore Sottsass ceramics for a few months from an espresso bar at Charivari, the avant-garde clothing boutique that had its heyday in the 1980s, he opened his own shop, Moss.

It was 1994 when the store appeared on Greene Street in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan. Its logo was inspired by Oscar Mayer. It looked more like a museum than a store, which was appropriate because at the time the storefronts south of Houston Street were still mostly art galleries.

The objects on display were peculiar (a bowl made from melted toy soldiers), beautiful (18th-century Meissen porcelain plates), functional (a Braun calculator) and often wildly expensive. A full set of the Robber Baron collection by Studio Job — gilded bronze objects freighted with social commentary, like a safe topped with a Jack in the Box — could run upward of $600,000.

It was slightly problematic that Moss didn’t believe in markdowns. If pressed, he would admit to a profound ambivalence about the actual act of selling, though he loved the narrative qualities that good retailing requires. He was so successful at creating a museumlike atmosphere that customers routinely asked, “Do you know where I can buy these things?”

The store was very cold, because Moss didn’t want his customers to get too comfortable. It was very clean. Moss developed a rash on his hands from the Glass Plus-soaked paper towel he carried like a talisman (he was proud to receive a “customer loyalty letter” from that company).

Moss employees were encouraged to do the same. There were many, many signs that exhorted, “Please Do Not Touch,” which was more of a manifesto than a caution because everything was locked behind glass vitrines. As Franklin Getchell, Moss’ partner in life and business, said recently, “Basically, the signs let you know who was in charge.”

For 18 years, Moss was a global tastemaker, presided over by its impish and dictatorial impresario. “The Kanye West of the furniture market,” as Kanye West, a regular customer, once described Moss. There was a time when the music mogul, who lived upstairs from the store, would regularly text Moss — no words, just a photo of a vase, say, with a question mark.

Moss was a bit slow to cotton to the extent of West’s fame. “I thought he was very sweet,” he said. Elton John was another regular, though Moss’ only interaction with that pop star came late in the store’s long, bucketing run, when John suggested he carry the iron gates made by Bob Dylan, a suggestion Moss did not follow through on. “We didn’t really sell gates,” Getchell said.

In the early ‘90s, purchase of contemporary art began to eclipse all other forms of conspicuous consumption. If, as Moss said, “collecting is the only socially commendable form of greed” — the quotation is from Eugene Schwartz, the adman and art collector — Moss would endeavor to rub shoulders, as he put it, “with Art and the Art Audience.”

For their part, furniture designers — from the Netherlands and elsewhere — were behaving like comp-lit majors, embedding their work with ideas about society, craft and politics. A chair was no longer just a chair. Moss’ other idea about his store was that it was theater, and everything that happened there was a performance. In the early days, Moss staffers worked under assumed names, mostly with stripper overtones, like the guy who called himself Tommy Diamonds.

When Moss held a Tupperware party and persuaded that company to make a suite of containers in black, the objective was not so much to sell plastic tubs — the party did break sales records for the company, Moss said — but to perform, as he’ll tell you, “a unique distribution system.”

When Moss met Dutch designer Maarten Baas, who was setting fire to furniture with a blowtorch, he proposed that Baas try taking a torch to design classics — furniture by Charles and Ray Eames, or Ettore Sottsass, or Tejo Remy, another Dutch designer, whose most famous piece was a pile of drawers strapped together with a leather belt — for a collaboration called “Where There’s Smoke …”

For the opening of Moss Los Angeles in 2007, perhaps not the best year for an expansion, as Getchell said ruefully, Moss had Baas burn a Steinway. (It was priced at $155,000 — tuning and delivery were extra — and it sold.)

In early 2012, Moss closed, a casualty of the recession and its own success, as the European companies that for years Moss showcased, like Alessi and Kartell, opened showrooms along Greene Street. They couldn’t tell a story like Moss, but they did believe in sales. Also, there was no longer much appetite for torched furniture priced at six figures. And Moss and Getchell were exhausted.

“Please Do Not Touch,” their memoir of those years, is out this week from Rizzoli. Written as dueling monologues, the book offers a lively cultural history of Manhattan at the turn of the millennium. It is a love story — to the city, to the designers they featured and to each other — and it is very funny.

“When I read what he’d written, I freaked out,” said Moss of Getchell’s work. “I had no idea ——”

Getchell broke in, “That I was there?”

Moss put his face in his hands. “I knew we had different days,” he said. “I didn’t realize how different.”

It was a crisp March afternoon. A year and a half ago, Getchell, now 71, and Moss, now 69, left Manhattan, moving into an idiosyncratic Colonial Revival house near New Haven that was designed by Alice Washburn, a schoolteacher turned architect who has designed 80 very particular houses here. From it, they run Moss Bureau, a design consultancy, and Moss teaches graduate students in design.

The couple met nearly 50 years ago at a party and have been together ever since. Getchell, raised in Maine and educated at Harvard, was also an actor, then a television producer and programmer (of “Sesame Street,” among other shows) before running the business side of Moss, a job that often put him at odds with his partner’s curatorial tics. (Getchell likes to say that the only difference between television and retail is shipping.) “The Great Enabler” is how he described his role, writing in “Please Do Not Touch”: “He could not have done it without me. Without him, I had nothing to do.”

Paola Antonelli, senior curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, said: “They are of one mind in their love for design, but split when it comes to what should be sold and what should not. If Franklin is the consummate businessman, Murray is the consummate collector. Hence the push and pull, yin and yang, Felix and Oscar relationship between them.” There was the time Getchell invited Moss to speak to the HCs, short for “happy couples,” as part of the store’s wedding registry program, a sine qua non for a certain cohort of moneyed, aesthetically aspirational Manhattanites. (It was Getchell’s idea to pioneer a practice whereby couples would register for this or that small object as a kind of beard for their relatives, who would think they were paying for an Alessi cheese grater, and then cash in those amounts for big-ticket items like a sofa.) Moss was dimly aware that the registry existed, and less than enthusiastic about being asked to address its customers.

“I was resentful,” he said. “It was a disaster. There were three couples ——”

“There were three people,” Getchell corrected.

Moss continued: “And I said something like, ‘What are the chances that you’re both going to like the same thing? You’re going to take a bath and want a cup of tea. And you’re going to take a shower and want a cup of coffee. So why buy 12 of each? Why not just buy one? Also, who cares about your guests? Why not just buy one $1,000 dinner plate that you share in the bathtub?'”

Getchell banished him from the registry.

Moss’ philosophy about markdowns meant that objects might hang around the store for months. If something failed to sell, Moss believed it was a failure on his part to tell a proper story about it. So he would move stuff around. “When did this come in?” a customer might ask of a piece that had been there for nearly two years.

“A sale says the object is worth less,” Moss said. “But what made it lose value? It’s an inanimate object. It didn’t do anything wrong.”

Getchell gave him a baleful look. “We didn’t have a sale for 12 years,” he said.

When the recession hit in November 2008, people stopped buying things altogether, Getchell said. “The Big Stop,” he called it. “The Big Stay Home.”

But it took four years to kill the store, an anguished period in which they lost millions of dollars while their rent climbed to $60,000 a month, the store’s assets were seized briefly by New York state for nonpayment of sales taxes, and Moss was found to have Parkinson’s disease. Getchell weathered it all with typical black humor. Moss was less sanguine, but philosophical.

“We were born to molt,” Moss said. He led a tour through their new house, which is filled with Moss classics — an Eames leg splint burned by Baas, some vases by Hella Jongerius, a stack of kitchenware rendered in bronze by Studio Job — that looked quite nice against the knotty pine paneling and fake William Morris wallpaper. Since closing the store, Moss has channeled his compulsion to “put this next to that” into rearranging the furniture here before Getchell wakes up.

The house’s contrasts are pleasing to Moss, whose family home in suburban Chicago contained its own anomalous pairings. His father manufactured X-ray machines, and used to test his equipment on his children in his basement laboratory. His domestic interventions were commercial flourishes like Borax soap dispensers, electric hand dryers, an intercom and a pedal-controlled water fountain installed to eliminate the need for water glasses at the table.

These objects were mediated by Moss’ mother’s desire for a traditionally decorated suburban showplace, so the hand dryers were glazed to match the bathroom tiles and the intercoms were papered over in grass cloth and floral prints. “Deco Tech” is how Moss described the end result.

Moss does like contrapositives. In the book, he writes of the evening he decorated a Christmas tree for Moss’ holiday window display with 100 foot-high, sperm-shaped ornaments made of iridescent gold glass. “I was thinking, ‘Immaculate Conception,'” he said. “I was feeling my oats. I had my tree. I had a cascade of sperm. It was fabulous. OK, but then I should have stopped.”

The coup de grâce was the legend he then affixed to his window in big vinyl letters: “Santa’s Coming,” it read. It was at that moment that the co-op president of the building passed by the window. She gave Moss her habitual thumbs up; “She was always very encouraging,” he said. Five minutes later she was back, frantically miming a different message. “You can’t mess with Christmas,” Moss said, sadly.

The ornaments never sold, Getchell added. “We still have all 100 in storage somewhere.”