Words Tony Moxham

Photography Don Freeman

Originally published in issue 7.

This interview has been condensed for online use.

Stop the presses:

To coincide with upcoming Issue 13, where Murray Moss shares his collection of amazing press photos, we revisit our feature on him and his partner Franklin Getchell from issue 7, The House Where Everything Is For Sale.

If you were a young designer, selling at Moss was akin to being awarded a Grammy or an Oscar — except it was for making beautiful stuff. Moss was a client of DFC, the contemporary Mexican design brand I founded with my partner Mauricio (Paniagua). 

Misters Moss and Getchell championed the decorative and the difficult in design, which made them infamous in the industry and genius retailers. In 2018 they published a memoir of sorts called Please Do Not Touch (titled after the proliferation of tiny signs admonishing shoppers at every Moss location), and also moved out of town . . .

Tony Moxham: How are you both this morning? How come you moved out of town?

Franklin Getchell: When the store closed we realized that we didn’t have to be physically in the city so we decided we’d move away. Now we are in Connecticut, on the coast, about ten minutes away from New Haven. It’s hard to define Hamden, our town. It’s a bedroom community for Yale, so our block was where all the professors started to move. We named our house “Torpedo House” because it’s named after the head of the physics department who had invented the homing torpedo.

Murray Moss: There was no intention to live here. We were looking at modernist houses and then for various reasons fell in love with this house. When we bought it we realized we were in a company town and that we were not part of the company. Let’s say it’s taken about a year of transition to sort of become part of the scene here.

FG We’ve discovered an entirely new category of human beings called “neighbors.” We now find ourselves, after fifty years in New York and of never knowing anybody, knowing everybody [laughter]. Several of them have now picked up on the curation that Murray does in the house, largely one of juxtaposition, and now they come in to see what’s been moved and what’s been put together. There was a resistance to the world we live in, which is the world of object culture. They didn’t recognize that world and it wasn’t meaningful to them. It took a fair amount of time to educate them because we were not planning to change. [Laughter]

TM Murray, are you still re-arranging stuff on a daily basis like you did at the Moss store?

MM I’m the same guy. I wake up at four and I go downstairs and start to move things around. I’ve discovered how easy it is when you drag things on a towel. All those years I never actually needed to have an installer because I could have just used a towel. That’s part of the reason RISD was interested to bus these students here, because the course involves what I do at home. We talk about how one sees things and their relation to each other, but also the fact that each of us is never looking at the same thing, we are each seeing through our own filter and seeing differently. Brain science — and how that affects how one sees art — is what’s interesting to me at this point. The brain versus the mind. This is all relatively new, and is certainly new to a shopper, or a designer, or an artist. Whatever one is making is going to be perceived to a great extent through the brain . . . to a large extent it’s neurological.

TM It’s interesting how the brain as an organism responds to visual stimuli. Your brain decides a lot without your mind having much input. The Moss store was around the corner from where I worked at Interview, and I remember when you started putting Meissen and Nymphenburg porcelain around the store. It was a treat to see.

MM Oh that’s very nice to hear. It actually caused trouble because people don’t know what to do when they’re looking at an object. Should they evaluate it strictly on it’s functional criteria? Or should they use the criteria of what they believe to be the definition of good taste versus bad taste? 

TM People don’t look at design the same way they look at art or architecture. 

MM There is the “art” of architecture, but then there is still the necessity of having objects that are evaluated strictly on their capacity to perform a function or task. I think that’s the duality, the possibility something can be both functional and evocative. And what that means is a person cannot be both a designer of a functional object and an artist. I take issue with that.

TM Now you’re outside of Manhattan, do you find your eye being drawn to different kinds of beauty?

FG Murray has become obsessed — I think that’s the word — with the land outside the house. Before I got up this morning he had met with our gardener, Jesus, and his assistant, Angel, and they’ve planned their nursery trip for today. Now when I get up I don’t know what will be in the house or where it will be, and I also don’t know what trees will be around outside the house. 

MM I never went outside. The closest I came to some sort of garden was living in a building that had planters with evergreens in them. When we took the house here it had three distinct zones, and I was outof my depth. I was in denial, basically, so I didn’t do anything. We didn’t mow the lawn, but we let ourselves experience what happens over four seasons. I started to get interested and we began by pruning and feeding. We saw that there was in fact a layout. By tomorrow I will have finished the first goal, meaning we can sort of see distinct areas and enjoy them now. And then I’ll pick it up again in fall. I’ve never understood why people were so into this, but they are either obsessed or heavily uninterested, nobody is middle of the row. 

TM Franklin, you’re not interested in gardening, even though you grew up on a farm?

FG Doesn’t that explain it?

TM And within the house do you each have favorite rooms?

FG I have my office, and I’m not really allowed to go into any other rooms, so I’d say this is my favorite.

TM [Laughing] Okay. And Murray?

MM We renovated or did what we wanted to do to the ground floor, and we’re waiting on the second floor for more money and more ideas. The second floor is very different from the first.

TM Is it true that the house had no kitchen when you guys moved in?

MM No stove. When we signed the contract, the agent leaned over and asked how come we didn’t say anything about the stove. That’s because we didn’t think about it. We never cooked.

FG Speaking of stoves, we’ve had a stove issue almost everywhere we’ve lived because we don’t use the stove. The apartment we moved out of was in Olympic Tower, built in 1975, and the stove still had the manual inside and stickers on the oven. Not only had this stove not ever been replaced since 1975, it had never been turned on. In another place further downtown we were the first tenants in this large apartment, and when we moved out we discovered that the stove had never even been hooked up to the gas.

MM When we first arrived and the parade of things got placed in the house, we looked at them and we were so freaked out we immediately left to stay in a hotel.

FG For six months.

MM It really felt like our objects were looking at us, saying “Now what, big shot?” And then we went to Stop & Shop. This was the first place we went to buy food. We had never been to a grocery store. Ever. When we needed milk and food or things we would order from the concierge. They would come and put it in the refrigerator. So we had no idea where food came from. Not just if it was from an animal or the ground, but what store it came from, how you received it, whether it came in a box. We went to Stop & Shop and they have forty-six aisles. We were beside ourselves. And people were looking at us because our mouths were open. What we wound up buying were basically party platters, like taco platters with guacamole, they were the only things that we recognized. 

FG It’s improved now.

TM Is there anything you like cooking?

FG No. It’s a very primitive operation, and if anything takes longer than ten minutes I don’t do it. One thing we learnt to appreciate here, and which we’d never experienced, is big box stores. It’s all new to us; going to Home Depot, Costco or Ikea. We spend a lot of time in these places.

TM Are you guys still in the process of decorating?

MM Well we’re experimenting with the second floor. The architecture is interesting. It was designed by Alice Washburn, who not many people have written about. She was not recognized, not authorized to even sign documents — she needed a male counterpart to sign her drawings. The dean of architecture at Yale hadn’t even heard of her. Yet she built eighty-plus houses in Hamden. And then she stopped with the Depression and maybe went bankrupt or went back into total oblivion. In my mind, this is fairy-tale architecture. The reason I say that is because I think she was free from the school of “how things should be,” and so I imagine that she imagined herself some days working in the 18th century, other days in the 19th century, and then in the 12th century.

TM The work of Alice Washburn reminds me of her west coast contemporary, Julia Morgan, who designed more then 700 buildings in California and was the chief architect behind Hearst Castle. She created a similar mismatch of cultures and time periods . . .

MM  . . . which is parallel to what I’m trying to do at RISD, looking at what used to be called “historicism.” People in decor used to commit, like “I’m going Oriental.” Now we can process a multiplicity of methods or materials or expressions. My favorite room in the house — I look upon it as a room but it’s not really a room — is a point where I believe she painted herself into a corner. It’s what made me want this house. You open a door and there are four more doors facing one another. It’s amazing but it’s kind of an “oops” moment, which I think she handled by doing what she did. As a result, there are no dead ends. In fact it’s the opposite.

FG There are fifty-two doors in this house. There are areas similar to what Murray has described where even eight doors come together. 

MM Ms. Washburn actually wrote she felt the job of an architect was best suited to a woman, because only a woman will truly understand the domestic requirements of a space. I thought that was great. Nobody knows about her but I hope that we can find the time to document the whole thing.

FG You asked about a favorite room. We have a guest room, the Suicide Suite. We had someone stay overnight recently and it was very exciting because we’d never had a guest room before. We’d never had an overnight guest. Funny how that goes together. Well, the room has these press photographs of suicides.

MM Franklin and I are working on this collection of original vintage prints that were kept by newspapers. The prints are completely annotated, front and back, and have been used over and over in such a manner that they actually become complex works of art. We have so many and I really enjoy them, but we can only show a limited number in the house. The other things I decided to collect are most hated objects. Aside from Nymphenburg porcelain, the new hated object is ‘70s stoneware. People volunteer their opinion. They can’t wait to tell me how much they hate it.

FG It’s brutalist pottery.

TM And the house itself is also a gallery or store, right? 

FG We’re listing it as a “house-gallery” that takes appointments from people. There are prices on pretty much everything. The pitch is that you get to look at everything in-situ, in a residential situation. 

TM And is anybody allowed to touch anything?

 FG No. [Laughing]

Read about the Press Photo Collection in issue 13.

Learn more at Murray Moss Back with More. Please Do Not Touch is published by Rizzoli. 

Tony Moxham’s artisanal Mexican design work for @mtobjects @totaldfc

Photographer & Filmmaker Don Freeman contributes to World of Interiors donfreemanphoto.com