Hotel Interiors by Barlas Baylar
Upscale Comfort Away from Home
Barlas Baylar is a New York City widely renowned for his minimalist conceptions that blend natural elements with modern aesthetics. To tour his showrooms at Hudson Furniture is to step through a world where nature has been re-imagined by architecture, as if the 21st Century were yearning for the preceding millennia. There is displayed the evolution of chandeliers, tables, bed frames and their headboards. Metal, wood, glass, and stone have been reworked to furnish civilization. Chain chandeliers with softly curving waves of metallic piping that trace the descent of light through glass strands dripping like fringe. The bittersweet majesty of expiring trees memorialized as solid slabs for seats. Then there are the accessories that seem at once both stone and wood – petrified wood, naturally. Yet all these floor examples only begin to suggest the prodigious output of Baylar’s busy NYC workshop.
Twenty-four craftsmen help realize his visions into the utilitarian artwork now popular with celebrity apartments and upscale boutiques alike. Each piece is unique, and none are quite the same. With a background in production design and a family tradition rooted in machinery manufacturing, Baylar founded Hudson Furniture to create all-natural antiquated materials that can be modernized with industrial detail to make for organic structures which can transform interiors into exteriors. Surfaces are not simply sanded down, but burnished by hand with broken glass to uncover nature’s own eternal handiwork below.
Concern for nature informs Baylar’s very manner of working, and he is no simple far-off admirer. Devoted to the conservation of nature, he uses only sustainable materials for his consoles, panels, sofas, mirrors, and other works. Dead or dying lumber is domestically sourced from arbor salvaged of wind and storm damage. Claro Walnut, Black Walnut, Myrtle, Jasmine, Acacia, Satinwood, and Ebonized Pine are only removed by rightful owners such as farmers only to prevent damage to houses or other trees. Nothing is left to waste, with leftover scraps and cuttings of every irregularity integrated into each new work. And with the connections cultivated through familial ties and personal experience in various industries, Hudson Furniture is able to ensure the proper origins of its materials, gaining even the official permission of embassies and consulates where necessary imports are concerned. In fact, Hudson Furniture is proud to be New York’s sole repository for legally harvested petrified wood. In this way can Baylar’s geometric forms, traditional joinery techniques, and hand-rubbed oil finishes continue to return to the nature from which it eternally reemerges to furnish civilization.