Naturally, he needed a work place. In the changing neighborhood of the 1965 East Village, a storefront with ample shop space was available. As soon as he was able to squeeze it in, he built his first speculative piece: a bench-like coffee table with a trestle base. He put it in the show window, and it quickly sold. He kept feeding that window with new designs, and they sold or served as the basis for orders for different sizes. Soon he was custom designing and building all forms of residential furniture, based on a style called at the time “Mediaeval Modern.” The shop was written up first in the New York Times and then as a feature article in Cue Magazine, with several photos and glowing copy. When he opened up the shop on the Saturday morning after the article appeared in Cue, there was a line outside the door. The primitive heavy wooden furniture with a polished time-worn feel and shape provided a welcome contrast to the stark exteriors and interiors of Manhattan apartments and town houses.
The First House
Despite all his success, he was not creating architecture. He was able to obtain an oceanfront lot on Fire Island for $11,200, which was, even in 1966, an incredibly low price. The former house had been washed away, along with the rest of the neighborhood, in the great storm of November 1962.
In 1967 he met Robin, who became his receptionist and later his wife. That Autumn, Peter Asher Furniture had become established enough that she and Peter were able to return to Europe, where Peter showed her some of the places where he had worked and traveled. They rented an apartment in Zermatt, Switzerland, for a week, and life slowed down enough for him to work on the design of a beach house for the Fire Island lot.
Though five years had passed, he was still smarting from the time his instructor told him he shouldn’t design a curved beach house, so naturally he proceeded to do just that. He had become intrigued by the hyperbolic paraboloid designs in free-form concrete by the South American Architect Roberto Candela. It seemed to him that the wooden forms built to shape the concrete shell would form a more desirable structure than the concrete version.
Peter's design method was to create the general room positions and traffic flows for a floor plan, then add the parabolic window and door walls, and then to let those elements determine the shape of the structure. The work went directly from the floor plan to a scale model, which he placed outside on a deck rail and photographed. It was only after the prints were made that the resemblance between the model and the Matterhorn behind it became apparent. Coincidence, or osmosis?
In the summer of 1968, Peter began building the beach house. He had no experience or training in home construction, which was probably what made the house possible. The techniques used to create it were akin to boat building and model aircraft building and were blended with techniques he culled from various construction manuals.
As mentioned earlier, he had trouble coming up with a feasible roof treatment. When he decided to use cedar shingles, he still had the problem that the roof contractors did not know how to apply their craft to this new and different roof shape. Peter had to design and build the complex parts himself, even though he had never before touched a shingle. This is an example of why a sophisticated original design should ideally be part of a design/build package. The creator of the form must often develop the techniques necessary to render it!
DeckscapeSM
After it was completed, the beach house was seen by a couple with an extemely challenging full-acre rear yard needing decks and landscaping. There was an indoor pool house up on a steep hillside, a full story higher than the house, and behind that, the land rose another forty feet. The yard had been roughed-out into many levels with railroad ties, but the owners were not satisfied with the results. They saw in the curves and original techniques of the beach house the possibility that Peter could create for them the backyard they really wanted. When it was finished, it included four thousand square feet of decking, a half acre of interwoven walks, stairs, benches, and planters, and an arched bridge onto an Oriental-style roof deck. DeckscapeSM began with a bang, not a whimper.
California Woodworking
The neighborhood of the furniture shop in Manhattan, The East Village, deteriorated very fast in the early seventies. Peter and Robin had children to raise, so they closed the doors. It had been a once-in-a-lifetime old-world combination of a large storefront, with a shop in the back and an apartment over, in a pleasant mixed-ethnic neighborhood that held block parties.
After closing the furniture business, Peter built DeckscapesSM on Long Island, and the family spent a couple of winters in Southern California, where Peter found a seasonal niche subcontracting interior and exterior finish work in Malibu. That led to a permanent move to the West Coast.
One day, he went into the local bookstore and discovered it to be owned by a former client from the New York furniture days. Her husband was a California attorney who commissioned Peter to build desks and accessories for his new office. Now he needed a shop again! They had missed the furniture business, working directly with clients on a design-build basis. They set up shop in the Bay Area, where Robin’s family lived. At one point, they had a showroom in Mill Valley’s Old Brown’s Store (photo right).
When the Pier 39 project opened at Fisherman’s Wharf, Peter was commissioned to design and build a full store interior, and this led to other similar work. He also developed a line of upscale office furniture (photo left), including unique and functional desk designs combining Early American with Old Spanish, a variety of wood-and-leather couches and chairs, and large wood and glass conference tables. He was shipping and sometimes trucking office furniture to Palm Beach and New York City.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4
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