#00038 - The great throne paradox
A designer in handcuffs, a win for licensing, and the most beautiful room I’ve ever seen.
Hello readers…
I’m writing this from the wrong side of the road. We’re somewhere between Richmond and Windsor, it’s pushing 35 degrees here (that’s mid-nineties in real money) and I keep clipping the curb on the left because I’m used to driving on American roads. This is my one family vacation of the year. Kew Gardens this morning (no shade where we walked, it felt like standing in a desert) and Windsor Castle tomorrow. The kids demanded the Ted Lasso pub. We found the Ted Lasso pub. Believe!
A confession about vacations: I have never once set an out-of-office. I push everyone at my brands to take real time off. Go be with your families and decompress. But I sell fabrics. I’m not a brain surgeon. If you have a fabric question, call me. Taking an hour on the road to work on this journal is not stressful. I love it too much for it to feel like work.
We just toured Buckingham Palace, and to be honest, the interiors were “meh.” I expected something grander. Then we walked into the Palace of Westminster, and the Lords Chamber took my breath away. I’ve been to every Newport mansion, every Venetian palazzo, Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, and the Lords Chamber is the most beautiful room I have ever stood in. The carving, the gold leaf, the color, the works. It’s over the top, but it all came together anyway.
I found myself lecturing my kids about it. I told them, this room is a paradox. This is the house of a lot of criminals. Think how many people you could feed with the money behind one square inch of one statue in one corner of that palace. But without governments and crooks commissioning at this level, nobody makes anything this beautiful, and beauty at this level inspires the next generation to greatness.
London gets it, by the way. My kinda place. Every restaurant and hotel room in this city gets the lighting and the proportions right. We ate in a room covered, ceiling included, in one very risky green, and they somehow pulled it off. This may be the most design-literate city on earth, which is why it’s such a strong market for my brands. I even spotted a wallpaper in Parliament that looked like one of our own designs, and I’ve already told my youngest son to start working on the next palace commission. The wall coverings in there now are beautiful and predictable. We can do better.
Back in the ol’ USA, the government dropped new tariffs last Friday, a California recycling law landing on textile houses, a designer was arrested in Lake Arrowhead, and Missouri is leading the way on the professional licensing idea we’ve been hoping for. Government gives and government takes, I guess.
And thank you to everyone who shared last week’s RH exclusive. That one was our most-read issue ever.
See you next week.
Mr. Thread
🏭 INDUSTRY
Interior motives.
This one caught my eye. A 58-year-old Lake Arrowhead interior designer is sitting in the West Valley Detention Center facing nine felony and misdemeanor charges, including grand theft and diversion of construction funds. According to the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, a client paid her firm, Coronado by Design, $67,500 in October 2024 to remodel a kitchen and three bathrooms, then the designer ghosted them. According to Houzz, her project budgets range from $100,000 to $2 million, and detectives believe there could be more victims. Money flows through a designer’s hands by the millions. Clients hand money to unlicensed strangers and hope for the best, and on most projects nobody checks. Which leads me to the next story…
“[The designer] delayed the project with various excuses for nearly a year.”
— San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, via SFGATE
Licensed and bonded.
We have been calling for this forever. On July 13, Missouri governor Mike Kehoe signed Senate Bill 1233, an omnibus licensing bill that converts interior designer registration into full licensure and gives NCIDQ-certified interior designers the right to sign, stamp, and seal their own blueprints, no third-party architect required. Designer Kerry Schuette and her St. Louis colleagues won it the hard way, borrowing a play from Missouri’s cattle ranchers who lobby the state capitol every single week. Interior design is now regulated in 31 states plus Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, and 20 of those allow sign-and-seal. Ours remains the one profession anyone can claim by waking up tomorrow and printing a business card. Clients rarely question an architect’s fees. A license, or stamp of approval, like the black rooster on a bottle of real Chianti, is how our industry could earn the same respect.
“They walk in with their big cowboy hats and their big belt buckles and everybody knows it’s Wednesday at the capitol. We made the decision to strategically speak to every senator and representative that we possibly could.”
— Kerry Schuette, founder of VVell Studio, via Business of Home
Off the charts.
A quick thank-you. Last week’s exclusive on the Chinese factories reverse-engineering the RH catalog reached 216% of our typical audience — our most-read issue we’ve ever put out. People passed it around and talked about it all over social media, especially on Reddit. Our chemical testing surprised people most: a Duke University lab screened sofa fabric from RH and from a Foshan dupe factory, and both came back clean. One Redditor summed up the mood better than I could. See below. If you missed the story, catch up now. If it made you smarter, send it to a colleague. This is how a four-person editorial team thrives.
“Luxury furniture pricing has always been a performance art, so honestly whoever outperformed them deserves some kind of award.”
— Redditor sam-otter90, via Reddit.com
The $76 million fixer-upper.
Ken Fulk is on the A-list of designers; he’s the man behind Sean Parker’s “Lord of the Rings” wedding and the Carbone restaurants, and a great longtime client of one of my brands. In 2022 he paid $13.3 million for four storied West Marin properties owned by the late chef Margaret Grade, vowing to resurrect the legendary Manka’s Inverness Lodge. Instead he inherited $2.3 million in undisclosed hotel taxes, zoning nightmares, and a renovation loan that has ballooned past $17.1 million. Now foreclosure lurks on the horizon. Fulk is now suing Grade’s estate and associates for $76.3 million, and his own description of the deal explains the whole disaster: “handshakes instead of documents.” Get it in writing, even with a dear friend. Especially with a dear friend.
“Ken works well with tech billionaires and oligarchs and people who literally have no idea what to do with their vast amounts of wealth. Ken has plenty of ideas of what they can do with their vast amounts of wealth.”
— Mayer Rus, West Coast editor of Architectural Digest, via The San Francisco Standard
📊 ECONOMY
Nobody moves, nobody buys.
Georgia Furniture Mart, the Atlanta-area dealer that opened in 1986, is shutting its two stores, joining Big Lots, Value City Furniture, American Freight, and 17 independent dealers that have shuttered this quarter, according to Furniture Today. Per eMarketer, sales at furniture stores are down about 8% since 2022, and the first two months of this year fell another 4.8% year over year. With mortgage rates and home prices this high, housing turnover sits near historic lows, and people who don’t move don’t buy wardrobes.
“The combination of elevated mortgage rates and home prices has pushed housing turnover rates near historic lows. And if people aren’t moving, there are fewer consumers in the market for a new couch or dining table.”
— Zak Stambor, senior analyst at eMarketer, via Business of Home
🤖 TECH
The end of busywork.
Avoice, a Y Combinator-backed startup, says it has built the first AI agents that can run the entire back end of an architecture studio. They claim the AI can handle specs, schedules, invoicing, timesheets, and all the boring operational stuff. Project management is information flowing back and forth. Is it in stock, how many yards, what’s the price per yard, when does it ship, where is it going. That is the easiest work in the world for AI, and its arrival in design firms will be a monumental shift. I’ve signed up for demos of these platforms as a potential client. I’ll write full reviews for Mr. Thread Insider readers August, so you don’t have to sit through the sales calls.
“An email lives in Gmail. The spec lives in one tool. The schedule lives in a spreadsheet. QA markups live in a PDF. The budget lives somewhere else. Every time something changes, someone has to manually stitch it all together.”
— Chawin Asavasaetakul, co-founder of Avoice, via Dezeen
🧵LOOSE THREADS
• A recent book, Claying Architecture: Making Machine and Material Kin, gathers 30-plus architects and researchers on clay 3D printing: 10,000 years of mud meets the robot arm.
• Enjoy some color porn: A Dictionary Of Color Combinations Vol 1 (Japanese Edition).
🎲 PLAYTIME
Congratulations to Rachel vdB., Hillary E., Justine B., Tullia P., Amy G., and Freddy V. for correctly solving our final word of the season: EXPAT! Outstanding work, threaders!
Thank you for an amazing Playtime season 2!
A big thank you to all threaders who played along.
🏆 The grand raffle winner
Congratulations, Martin R.! You’ve won the grand raffle draw! You will be receiving:
A featured spotlight for you and your firm in an upcoming issue of Mr. Thread.
A special mystery gift from yours truly, Mr. Needle.
🎉 Special Honorable Mentions: A massive shoutout to Tullia P. and Hillary E. for topping our leaderboard with the highest overall points this season! While the random raffle draw crowned our single grand winner, your weekly precision throughout Season 2 was an incredible feat.
Playtime Season 3 is brewing!
Thank you all for being such loyal threaders. Rest up, because Playtime Season 3 is already brewing behind the scenes with fresh clues and new surprises. Keep an eye on your inbox for our upcoming launch date!
Stay sharp,
Mr. Needle
🎨 THIS WEEK’S ART
Mr. Weft here, Mr. Thread’s British editor, taking over as art director for the week. This edition’s art is by Sir John Lavery, a Belfast-born, Glasgow- and Paris-trained painter of great rooms, active from the 1880s to the 1940s. Lavery is best known as a society portraitist, though he also recorded the great ceremonial and legal interiors of his day. In the Commons, members address each other in the third person, and a Privy Counsellor is ‘the right honorable gentleman.’ It’s hard to explain to Americans, but in English, that phrase is also a devastating insult. Try it yourself.
🕵🏼♀️ MR. THREAD INSIDER
Welcome to Mr. Thread Insider, our new members-only section. This is where we dive deeper into the big story of the week
A SIT DOWN WITH MR. THREAD
Caitlin Penny
Caitlin Penny trained as a designer, then took a job dressing the interiors of private jets for Gulfstream Aerospace, where she first crossed paths with Rose Tarlow. A decade ago she joined Tarlow’s Los Angeles furniture and textile house, moving from sales into operations, and today runs the business as Managing Director. That means Governor Newsom’s new law is her problem. Signed in September 2024, SB 707 makes California the first state to hold clothing and textile makers responsible for collecting, repairing, and recycling what they produce. Penny, who also chairs the board of the West Hollywood Design District, is registering Rose Tarlow now, and thinking hard about what a law written for fast fashion means for a house built on furniture designed to last forever. We had a lot of questions…
