Issue link: http://papercitymagazine.uberflip.com/i/1547305
From a Swan Spout to an Atom By Rebecca Sherman Marissa Wagner Geoffroy's new book follows her family's company from the gilded Swan faucet to space-age atom knobs. W h i l e c o m b i n g through decades of archives for a new book on Sherle Wagner, the bath and h a r d w a r e company founded by her grandparents in 1945, Marissa Wagner Geoffroy came across a knob design unlike anything in the current collection: a sphere encircled by a ring of polished metal, like a small planet orbited by Saturn's rings. She guesses it dates to the 1960s, one of several Space Age pieces her grandfather dreamed up during the height of the space race, when science and the cosmos were reshaping American design. Not every one of those creations made it into production, but some did, including the Molecule collection, its knobs modeled on a cluster of atoms, which the company still makes today in nearly 20 finishes and 14 gemstone options. "He was always pushing the boundaries," Geoffroy says. "And because they're functional objects, that means pushing the boundaries of engineering, too." That same audacity and obsessive craftsmanship define the company today, and Geoffroy traces both in her new book, The Art of the Bath: Sherle Wagner (Rizzoli), from her grandfather's earliest designs to the storied company she now leads as chief creative officer. Long before Sherle Wagner became synonymous with gold- plated dolphin spouts and onyx sinks, the company's real starting point was less glamorous: closets. Sherle got the interior design bug from his father, a house painter he tagged along with as a child, and by the time he met his future wife, Rose, on a Catskills tennis court in his early 20s, he'd zeroed in on this overlooked space in Manhattan's finer apartments, lining closets with imported silk and topping them off with matching upholstered hangers. Rose, a natural at sales, launched the client relationships; Sherle negotiated the details and oversaw installation himself. Custom cabinet hardware followed to complete the look, marking his first foray into metalwork. "Closets were not a space that had been highly considered before," Geoffroy says. In some ways, she adds, the whole venture started when her grandfather found a source for exceptional silk that nobody else in New York had access to. A lightbulb went off. Ordinary c l o s e t s became an opportunity for some thing extra- ordinary — and turning the mundane into the remarkable became his guiding principle. Geoffroy points to something as unglamorous as the shutoff valve under a sink. Even tucked beneath a beautiful stone pedestal basin, he designed it with the same care as the faucet above it. From the book: "Why make something merely functional, he asked, when it could be a thing of beauty?" That question, applied first to a closet and later to an entire bathroom, is what turned a fledgling mom-and-pop business into an American design institution. G eoffroy came to the company in 2014, joining as creative director before being named chief creative officer, but her path wasn't a straight line. She trained first in law before turning to fine art, earning an MFA from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2017. She has since exhibited her paintings, sculpture, and photography in California, New York, and the Pacific Northwest, and continues to teach and Sherle Wagner Molecule Collection, first designed in the 1960s 60