The Mod Squad

Garbage and old tires litter the gray industrial area outside Farmhouse Furniture on East 59th Street in South-Central Los Angeles.

Inside, the view is decidedly different. The factory is humming. Some 60 workers are milling, drilling and carving pine from dawn to midnight, producing 250 stylish beds, night stands and dressers a week. Sherry Lintvedt, a former garment designer whose husband, Jon, started Farmhouse Furniture in 1991, says business is so brisk that they added a second shift in December.

In Gardena, Steve Galerkin, a fourth-generation furniture maker, is coming off a spectacular year. Sales at his upholstery plant more than doubled in 1996 to $4.5 million. With a backlog of orders worth close to $1 million, including chairs for Starbucks coffeehouses and Wolfgang Puck restaurants, Galerkin just leased more space down the block.

“Fashion’s the key,” said Galerkin, who looks younger than 41 in his ragged sweatshirt, jeans and baseball cap. “I’m in a major fashion industry, presenting designs to a new generation who never bought furniture. . . . Business is so good it’s beyond my greatest expectations.”

Only a few years ago, such optimism could not be heard in the corridors of Southern California’s furniture industry. Plagued by recession, foreign competition and air-quality regulations, dozens of furniture makers in the Southland closed up or fled to Mexico and other states around the country. Employment at household-furniture factories in Los Angeles County, the center of the state’s industry, fell to a low of 13,500 in 1993 from a peak of 24,500 in 1987.

Though employment has only crept back up since then, there is little doubt that a recovery is underway in the nation’s second-largest furniture-manufacturing center, after the High Point area of North Carolina.

“There is a comeback,” said Steve Herman, economic development director at L.A. Prosper Partners, a research and planning group that grew out of Rebuild L.A. (now RLA). Herman, who has done extensive research on Southern California’s furniture industry, said about 600 household furniture makers still operate in Los Angeles County, most of them small, family-owned shops. About 100 are based in South-Central Los Angeles, the heart of the county’s $2.6-billion industry, according to 1995 Dun & Bradstreet estimates.

“They’re adding employees; they’re growing,” Herman said.

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Leading the comeback is a new breed of furniture maker--relatively young, fashion-minded entrepreneurs who are taking their fresh California designs to new markets in the U.S. and abroad, notably Asia. Exports of California furniture and fixtures to Japan, for example, have jumped 18% since 1993 to about $42 million.

Some furniture makers, like the Lintvedts, jumped into the business in their mid-20s, seeing embers in the industry’s ashes. Others who grew up in furniture shops are remaking businesses that are decades old. And they are all now benefiting from the winnowed playing field and California’s improved economy and manufacturing climate.

Gary Stafford, chief financial officer at Terra Furniture Inc. in Industry, attributes the revival partly to what he calls “more reasonable regulations.”

During the fierce battles between the industry and air-quality regulators in the early 1990s, Terra, a maker of wood bedroom and dining room furniture, moved part of its production to Tijuana.

But last summer, the South Coast Air Quality Management District agreed to give manufacturers more time to add new coating technology that would cut smog-causing emissions. The accord was criticized by environmentalists but gave people like Stafford new hope.

“All we need is a good economy and for the government not to produce many more restrictive regulations,” said Stafford, adding that his firm has recently begun hiring again.

The recovery, however, has not been even. Some companies, such as Krause’s Furniture, a Brea-based sofa maker and retailer, are still struggling to adapt to shifts in consumer taste and buying patterns.

The recovery has also favored makers of upscale furniture such as Lazar Industries in South-Central, which sells its upholstered goods to trendy stores like Z Gallerie and Pottery Barn.

Jeff Lazar, 39, and his 34-year-old brother, Darryl, run the day-to-day operations at a shop founded by their father in 1982. To prepare for the change, Jeff Lazar went back to school a few years ago, earning an MBA from Pepperdine University. Since then, he has helped his company find markets in Japan, trained Latino factory workers in English and team-based production, and put up a Web site on the Internet.

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Lazar expects his business to do $25 million in sales this year, up 18% from 1996.

“What’s going on right now is that the baton is being handed to the sons,” said furniture maker Galerkin of Gardena, whose own situation also typifies this trend.

Galerkin’s furniture roots go back to 1906, when his great-grandfather Jacob began making cabinets in East Los Angeles after emigrating from Russia. Steve Galerkin learned the trade from his grandfather Sam and father, Harvey, who ran a children’s-furniture factory in South-Central until the manufacturer shifted production to Mexico in 1987.

Soon after, Steve Galerkin gave up his custom cabinet shop in Hollywood and joined up with his father. But in 1993, the Galerkins hit rock bottom. They lost their major customer and, at the same time, were battling with workers’ compensation claims and fire officials over environmental regulations. Desperate, the younger Galerkin found himself peddling his chairs out of a pickup truck.

What turned things around, he said, were new designs--such as his collection of Art Deco chairs based on an old French design--which he began to market to the East Coast and as far away as Hong Kong.

Galerkin has also, as his rivals have, taken part in the entertainment industry boom, producing tubular tables for Las Vegas resorts such as the newly opened New York, New York hotel casino.

“Most of our furniture is curvaceous, sexy and less restrictive,” said Galerkin, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. “The 20- to 40-year range, they want style, hip, an MTV version of furniture.”

Historically, California’s household furniture has had a distinctive look, reflecting the state’s casual indoor-outdoor lifestyle. And for decades, the industry had little trouble growing alongside the state’s booming population and housing market.

“If you track the furniture industry, it very much parallels the building industry,” said Ron Hoesterey, owner of Royal Mattress in Orange and executive director of the California Furniture Manufacturing Assn.

Industry employment in Los Angeles, which earlier in the century had surpassed San Francisco, shot up after World War II and then again in the 1980s, when retail furniture sales in California surged by 10% or more some years. (After falling during the recession, furniture sales rebounded by a modest 3% in 1995.)

Many originally set up in places like South-Central and Vernon with an industrial infrastructure and easy access to rails, suppliers and, later, a growing Latino work force, which makes up most of the industry’s factory workers.

“We’ve got a good labor base here that is very productive,” said John Sandberg, 32, vice president of sales and marketing at Vernon-based Sandberg Furniture Manufacturing, which, with more than 300 employees, is one of the region’s larger family-owned furniture makers.

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Nearly a century ago, John Sandberg’s great-grandfather Martin started out in Vernon making wood baskets. When shopping bags took hold, he switched to bedroom furniture. Today Sandberg Furniture specializes in low- and mid-priced bedroom furniture made out of simulated wood. John Sandberg said many of his customers are immigrant families in Southern California.

Sandberg declined to disclose sales figures but said business last year was essentially flat, after several up-and-down years.

“It’s beginning to improve,” he said.

Jack Kyser, an economist at the Economic Development Corp. of Los Angeles, said one key to the future of firms such as Sandberg lies in how fast the ethnic middle classes grow.

“You’ve got shifting demographics, and people have underestimated the effect of that on housing and the durable-goods industry,” he said.

Even so, Kyser and other analysts remain optimistic about furniture manufacturing in the region, saying they see a revival of entrepreneurial and creative spirit in an old, once-insular and once-moribund industry.

For the Lintvedts at Farmhouse Furniture, it all began with a table saw and some hand tools in a 3,000-square-foot warehouse in South-Central. In late 1991, Jon Lintvedt was just 25 and had only two years’ experience working in a furniture factory.

The Norway native, who came to California in 1989, had studied business administration in Oslo and speaks several languages, including Spanish. When he met and married Sherry, a UCLA graduate originally from Taiwan and with five years’ experience in garment design, they poured their energy into the business--she designing bed frames and he managing the finances and the Latino work force.

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Farmhouse grew by 100% in each of its first three years on the strength of products such as its Sonoma bed, a classic European sleigh bed design with contemporary metal grillwork. A year ago, the Lintvedts expanded into a 40,000-square-foot building at East 59th Street and Avalon Boulevard that had been vacated by a sewing contractor.

The business grossed more than $2 million in 1996, Jon said, and his goal is to do $3 million in sales this year.

“We would like to be like the other furniture manufacturers,” said Sherry, “and pass this along to our kids.”