Target Practice

Graves: At the beginning, we went to a big housewares show in Germany with all the buyers. And I asked the question: "Why are we going to Frankfurt?" They said, "We want to see the trends!" And I said, "Why did you buy me, then?" They couldn't figure out what I meant. I said, "Who made these trends? Designers, right? That's what we do." They had a hard time getting that. They were used to going to vendors in Frankfurt and saying, "We like this plate, but make the blue thing red, and change the pattern." That's the way they used to do it before designers.

FC: Were there any projects where you were particularly at odds?

Graves: I wanted to do a chess set. No designer had done one since the Bauhaus. So we took the idea to Target and said, "This is a great opportunity." They really had a hard time with it and said no. Finally, I said, "Humor me." So we made the pieces, and the wood for the board was great, and we designed a drawer with storage for checkers. Then a buyer called and said. "Everything's fine, you win, but we want the pieces to be colored." I said, "Chess doesn't come that way. Chess comes in black and white." And they said, "Well, could you make the black a kind of blue-gray? Or could you it make it mulatto black?" And I argued and argued and argued. And the letters started coming back and forth, with color chips in them. And we'd have to send them back. At some point somebody gave up and said, "OK, you can do it in black and white." It really started this enormous trend. Now everybody's got their own chess set, even MOMA.

FC: Clearly, you seem to have forged a happy working relationship since then, and paved the way for the company to bring in other designers.

Graves: Target's a horizontal company. Unlike Martha Stewart with Kmart, they discourage any one designer from taking over. They don't want the story to be three-fourths one person and one-fourth someone else. And that's why Isaac Mizrahi and other people have been added. And some designers do a good job, and stay, and others aren't there any longer. If we'd been hard to work with, we wouldn't be there anymore either.

FC: You've made all these things that go in houses. When are you going to make a house?

Graves: A few years ago, a Silicon Valley client asked us to look into modular housing. Two months into it, the economy fell apart and the project ended. But we still thought it was interesting to look at how you could make an affordable house, and then, if you could make an affordable house, how do you make an affordable room? Renovation is so expensive because it's so small. So we thought if you could make a prepackaged room, you could turn renovation into a commodity market and get the savings.

So we drew up some ideas for little pavilions and showed them to Target. They thought it was a great idea, and asked if we could find a really good manufacturer. So we found Lindal Cedar homes, which could make all the components, and already had a dealer network. So now, in one fell swoop, you can go on the Target web site and order a room. And you can change the color, and the roof, and customize it for your house. For us it was a great test balloon as to what we could do in the housing market.

We really believe that housing is where retail design was 15 years ago -- that it could benefit from the same injection of new energy and that you actually could bring good design in at a price people can afford.

If we had scads of dough, we could put up several hundred houses in Trenton and Camden to show people what a little square could look like. We're doing few houses in Trenton now, but they won't make a dent. If you could do a lot, that would be fabulous.

FC: Speaking of fabulous, your own house is pretty cool. What kind of reaction do people have when they see it?

Graves: Well, I love books, but my library, which is quite extensive, is filled. So for the past 10 years I've been stacking books on the floor against the wall. So when tour groups come through, they say, "Oh, look, dear. It's really OK to stack books!"