While the plot thickeners are all in the mix -- two ambitious brothers, a multimillion-dollar family business that began with the proverbial pushcart, an indomitable father -- the Maharam story is no made-for-television melodrama.
But it is a tale about the warp and weave of the design-crazed '90s and about how those brothers managed to make office upholstery something to rave about -- and even to bring into the home.
Maharam is a century-old textile company transformed over the last four years from a dowdy, mass-market operation known for fabrics sturdy enough to withstand a blowtorch into a company throwing off sparks. Last month the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum announced that Maharam is a finalist in its annual National Design Awards, which will be presented on Wednesday.
Having long outgrown its 1950s motto "House of Service," the Maharam name is now associated with some of the most progressive designs in the textile industry, including a rubberlike upholstery spun from the same mills used to make Prada's knapsacks and commissions to hot Dutch artists. Maharam has chalked up insider points as well by reintroducing patterns by design legends like Charles and Ray Eames, Alexander Girard, Verner Panton and Gio Ponti.
"They made a complete turnaround to become a real front-runner," said Jack Lenor Larsen, the modern textile designer and eminence grise of the industry, speaking of the Maharam brothers, Michael and Stephen, the fourth generation to run the company.
In an intensely competitive half-billion-dollar industry that sells contract textiles -- fabrics prized less for their looks than for their durability and flame resistance -- Maharam has played the panache card, and in the process, doubled profits to US$100 million over the last four years, said Stephen Maharam, at 39 the younger of the brothers.
"These are times when the difference between most designs is not the good versus the bad, but good versus great," said Michael Maharam, 42, the more outspoken of the brothers. Both are handsome in a wide-eyed Buzz Lightyear kind of way. "But there's too much splashy, flashy fluff out there," he added. "We're trying to do textiles that are clean, beautiful, perfect."
This swatch-world makeover began in the late 1960s with two brothers playing in the storage basement of an old Times Square warehouse. Their toys were Styrofoam balls, retractable extension rods and Mylar sheets, castoffs from their grandfather's garment-district business; he made stage curtains for theaters and panels for department store seasonal displays.
During their childhood, their father, Donald Maharam, had steered the company away from gold lame curtains to tap into a huge new market for hospital curtains, cubicle panel fabrics and grill cloths for RCA's first 10-inch color television cabinets. "It was not a company about creativity," Michael Maharam said. "It was about selling as many zillions of yards as possible."
The unglamorous held no appeal for Michael Maharam, who spent his 20s in self-discovery, working as, among other things, a maintenance man servicing celebrity aquariums in Beverly Hills. "Candy Spelling always wanted new fish brought in to match the color themes of her parties," he recalled of the movie mogul's wife. In San Francisco, he met Uschi Weismuller, a graphic designer from Switzerland, whom he married in 1997.
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