Sandwiches

Hansel, like some other Tillmans we know, loves animated gifs. He made this one of workers on his crew in Alaska erecting a utility tower—a structure with a specific name, we're sure, we just didn't catch it in the interview.

Jeez, you make one off-color, tongue-in-cheek comment about a supposedly thick-skinned family and the whole clan goes berserk. Or at least you get an inbox full of return insults. Let us be clear: in spite of all the ribbing, we love the Tillmans. In fact, we had a we-love-the-Tillmans post all ready to go as part of nostalgia week until a Tillman—Clovis himself—reminded us that not even the Tillmans get nostalgic about the Tillmans. Anyway, Hansel is a good lad, fun and smart and a skilled fabricator, we just wouldn't want to have him hanging around the shop full time. No disrespect, just honesty. There's a reason the guy moved to Alaska and somehow grew closer with the rest of the family. His medicine works best in small doses.

Imagine yourself in possession of a small but growing furniture company and that until now you and your partner and a couple of doofuses-for-hire have done everything to get you where you are. But where your are is not where you want to be. Plus, you've got more work than you can reasonably handle, what with life outside the shop and all (balance, friends, balance). What to do? If you're us, you interview a relative of one of the doofuses to lend a hand and lighten the load. That's right, a Tillman. Horsehead Crating Company. Skilled at all things hand made but, frankly, a bunch of assholes. Anyway, a week ago we interviewed Hansel Tillman, a Swiss cousin of the original Horseheads, for a straight-up DoubleButter opening. In the shop, making our furniture. More on the results of the interview in the coming week but for now just a couple shots from his portfolio. These are from his long stay in Alaska working as a jackass-of-all-trades for a power company. Like the rest of the Tillmans, he's got a fine eye for beautiful decay.

A year or so after we hooked up as DoubleButter, after the glow of that first show wore off, we found ourselves shouting to no one in particular in the dark wilderness of the unlinked-to Internet. Really, what good is a website and a sweet body of work if no one knows about them? We weren't (and aren't) about to launch any sort of conventional advertising blitz, partly because we couldn't afford it and mostly because it struck us as abjectly lame. So we hatched the idea of graffiti furniture, dropping a couple of un-asked-for benches in prominent places (both of which needed and need a good place to sit, if we do say so ourselves) and videotaping the whole silly stunt. The video and apparent ballsiness got picked up by a few blogs and no one got arrested and, holy shit, some people noticed. Scared the piss out of us though, in a fun way. Anyway, for old time's sake, here's a draft of the flier for the show we had at the 400 (as dead now as P Design Gallery) that the bench stunt was purportedly promoting and here's a link to the video showing the installations at the DAM and the MCA.

All those pieces in the Back Catalog section of the site? They're there for a reason: we designed them back in the day, before we figured out how to set ourselves up as a production furniture company, with an inventory and 10-day lead times. Still, they are well loved by us and others too. This, our Surfboy platform bed, is a favorite, at least judging by the number of clicks it gets on the site. Here it's shown with a model in the frame, blurred and ghostly, just to give a sense of proportion and scale. We abandoned the technique, but since we're feeling nostalgic and giving the past a second look, maybe we'll resurrect it.

Ah, the old website. Flash heavy and very fussy to maintain, fun and odd, all based on the photo studio we built in a garage behind a Cheesman Park apartment. We figured since we were taking pictures of our pieces in the space, why not show the products as a series of framed photos on the wall? Worked well enough at the time, but really, Flash? No more, at least not for us.

No, this is not the flyer for a new show at a fresh new design gallery in town. It's the flyer for an old show—a 5-year-ago show— in a long-dead design gallery that was a decade or two too early for Denver. P Design Gallery, in part of the space now occupied by Studio Como on Walnut, owned and operated by Paul and Pifuka Hardt. For this show, our debut as DoubleButter, they paired us with Tord Boontje, who of course was too international and too fancy-pants to even show up. Why did they pair us? Our guess is that Paul offered us the show before Mr. Boontje's minions got around to accepting an earlier invitation. Once we had both said yes, what choice did he have? For the record, we stole the show, no question. Here on the flyer, made months in advance of the show opening, are prototype versions of our Roadrunner chair and Armadillo coffee table, plus, oddly, an end bracket from our Elephant dining table suspended overhead. More nostalgic posts for as long as the feeling lasts.

So here we are, coming up on our 5-year anniversary, and one of us (at least) is in a nostalgic mood. So what the hell? Why not a week or so of posts looking back on where we've come from so we might get a better idea of where we're heading? Five years on and ready, more or less, to open up our first bricks-and-mortar retail spot in our much beloved hometown. All enabled by this silly little website and all those beautiful fools who've bought our furniture sight-unseen (bless you). More all week and more on the retail spot as we lock in the lease (and nail down who's going to run the thing). Today, a look at Peg Leg, the first chair we designed and built together. We made only one, and he's been dying a slow but beautiful death in our yard ever since. We settled on the basic design of the Roadrunner soon after we built this lad and never went back and dialed him in. In solid white oak and brushed and oiled cold-rolled steel.