Bright Eyes

Designing the future with Derek Chen.

If you’re expecting Derek Chen to be a walking encyclopedia of modern design, prepare to be surprised. The 40-year-old engineer-turned-furniture-designer and founder of Council, an SF-based design studio that debuted its premiere collection at this year’s International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York City, humbly admits that his design vocabulary is fairly limited.

“I’m not even smart enough to know what the furniture I don’t like is called,” says the Noe Valley resident. “I think, for instance, that a lot of Americans are drawn to, say, antiques because they have some sort of historical or cultural connection to them. But I don’t have that kind of history [in this country]. My parents immigrated from China”—to Illinois, where he grew up—“so my family is younger than most.”

It’s precisely this historical “deficiency”—and also, in Chen’s opinion, the distinct absence of true American design—that motivated him to establish Council (with the help of local design firms Mike & Maaike and One & Co. and renowned international designers Arik Levy and Khodi Feiz). “I’d been going to [Salone Internazionale del Mobile, in Milan] for years, admiring the quality of European furniture. But with the dollar so weak, it’s just too expensive,” says Chen, whose first company, Urbana Design, specializes in creating reasonably priced modern accessories for the home (case in point: his Teardrop vase, with its unusual zebrawood veneer). “I wanted to start an American furniture company that produces affordable, high-quality contemporary pieces.”

In keeping with Chen’s desire to revive the “postwar creative boom America experienced in the ’50s and ’60s” and to steer clear of the “current war-on-terror mentality and the Humvee-driving set,” a sleek yet grounded eight-piece collection evolved, aptly christened Optimism. And with such standouts as the Chrysalis stool by One & Co. (featuring a leather seat that lends gravitas to its delicate paper-clip-like base) and Chen’s own modular Section bench (shown below, and bearing an uncanny resemblance to the angled tip of a fountain pen), a glass-half-full outlook for the future of pedigreed American furniture isn’t hard to perceive. “It’s time for something fresher,” Chen says.

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