Barclay Butera has been redefining luxury his entire career and one thing has not changed: his firm belief in helping his clients achieve the “Better-Best” concept of living. The end result is a glamorous, yet completely livable environment that often integrates the client’s heritage pieces into the Butera philosophy of blending furniture and pattern-on-pattern fabrics and textures. He also frequently uses the mantra; “In interior design there are no rules.”
Butera grew up in the Interior Design business, working with his mother who designed for private clients worldwide. Earning his degree in political science and economics, he pursued a career in law after graduation. Within a year he returned to the interior design industry, opening his mother’s Southern California office. At 25, he found himself faced with a business opportunity to create and run his own stylish case goods company in Los Angeles. In 1993, he selected a strong team to grow with him and showcase the complete lifestyle direction in which he was heading. Butera’s taste, passion and vision were executed by his new staff, which included defining a new approach to cross-merchandising in furniture retailing.
Butera takes traditional fashion elements and interprets all aspects of tailored couture clothing into interior design. In creating ‘fashion for the home’, he has always guided his clients to integrate their own personal pieces with new classics that contain an edgier element. His transitional style grounds itself in European, American and Far East traditional influences, while adding his own contemporary twist. He is inspired by everything from fashion to his many travels and by all cultural periods. He especially enjoys the quintessential mid-20th c. American styles of old Hollywood, vintage West Palm Beach and early American design emphasizing clean, classic, tailored lines and the importance of intriguing fabrics and bold patterns. For a designer such as Butera, who conceives of a better-best living space akin to forming a great wardrobe, these design elements – along with integrity, creativity and timelessness—are key to his vision.
Butera has always focused on listening to the client and working closely with what they want. “I’m a huge believer in developing a lifetime partnership with my clients,” he says. “I also believe that you have to have something for everyone. It’s always about the customer, the quality, and service.” To that end, the entrepreneur designer has developed two umbrella brand identifiers within the Barclay Butera brand that focus on different qualities and price points, covering a vast spectrum of client needs.
BARCLAY BUTERA COLLECTION includes his current company, Barclay Butera Home (BarclayButeraHome.com), which focuses on his fine benchmade upholstery and case goods, distributed through over 300 retailers and showrooms nationally. COLLECTION also includes a national corporation, Barclay Butera, Inc. (www.barclaybutera.com), featuring three self-owned retail collection showrooms: his flagships in Los Angeles and Newport Beach, CA, service an extensive celebrity clientele list as well as premiere hospitality and commercial clients, and a satellite showroom in Park City, UT, focuses on sophisticated mountain living. The COLLECTION brand also includes an exclusive line of textiles and area rugs for Kravet Collections, coordinating paint collections from Benjamin Moore Paints, and custom upholstery and pillows for The Hearst Castle Collection®. In 2010, the BARCLAY BUTERA COLLECTION will be focusing on an outdoor line of textiles for Kravet Collections, along with a separate line of COLLECTION lighting, accessories, wallpaper and broadloom wool and viscose wall-to-wall carpet.
Butera has also created a more price-sensitive brand, BARCLAY BUTERA LIFESTYLE, to offer a key market “aspirational design at an attainable price”, Butera’s better/best approach. Currently offering home fragrance and candles from Archipelago, and wall art from Wendover Art Group, BARCLAY BUTERA LIFESTYLE will soon encompass a great diversity of product. Spring 2010 will add a 200-plus SKU bridge line of case goods and upholstery, distributed through Home Furnishings International Brands. BARCLAY BUTERA LIFESTYLE will also offer a new line of natural jute, sisal and sea grass wall-to-wall floor coverings and area rugs, along with an extensive release of price-sensitive LIFESTYLE accessories, lighting and occasional pieces.
Both the BARCLAY BUTERA COLLECTION and BARCLAY BUTERA LIFESTYLE brands will continue to reflect Butera’s reputation of focusing on better/best living. Just as the automobile industry has developed better/best levels of automobiles (3 series, 5 series, 7 series for example), Butera continues to approach the home furnishings industry as a well-rounded wardrobe, because as he notes, “We all love our Gap t-shirt mixed with a great pair of designer jeans.”
Butera’s book, Living In Style (Assouline Publishing), a 15-year retrospective of his interior design projects divided into lifestyles, was released in the Fall of 2008.. He has appeared on NBC’s Today Show, Extra!, CBS, ABC, Fox, Beautiful Homes & Great Estates and HGTV; and has received press in the New York and Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, House Beautiful, Traditional Home, Veranda, House & Garden, ELLE DECOR, Western Interiors & Design, Luxe, Robb Report and Esquire.
