It all started with 7 dining room chair styles and half a dozen different dining tables. Twenty-five years later, Mitchell Gold and Bob Williams have expanded their eponymous furniture and accessories company to include pieces for every room of your home. In those 25 years, a lot has changed in the design world, but the principles that the company was founded on have not: comfort, beautiful design, and purpose still reign supreme.
To celebrate their anniversary, the duo is hosting 25 parties in 25 cities, and Dallas was one of their favorite stops. Check out our Q&A below, where we chat about how they got started in the furniture design business, their favorite part of the design world, and what’s coming in 2015.
How did you get started in the furniture business?
Mitchell: Well, I was in the furniture business for years as a buyer at Bloomingdale’s and a couple other big furniture companies. Bob was a graphic artist by training and worked for Seventeen Magazine and an ad agency. We wanted to work together as a couple and decided to start our own business. Furniture was the thing we thought we could do the best. We had an idea of how we wanted to run the company, what kind of design we wanted to have, and we were too naive to think we couldn’t do it! So we just did it.
What was the design world like when you started in the business?
Mitchell: In 1989 nobody really talked about comfort when it came to furniture. They talked about design, and they talked about prices, but they really didn’t think about making things comfortable. Our first product was a very comfortable upholstered dining room chair. We started a business making dining chairs in beautiful fabrics that shipped quickly and eclectic dining tables. We recognized that homes were changing, and that dining rooms weren’t as big or as formal as they had been before.
How has the design world changed since 1989? Besides the evolution of the dining room space.
Mitchell: It was much more focused on a casual country design. In the mid-90’s Bob and I really put out clean and modern furniture that was comfortable, which was important. We felt that we could do significant business by presenting modern furniture that has a traditional history behind it. It was a clean, modern, and very American look that we developed.
What’s happening at Mitchell Gold + Bob Williams in 2015?
Mitchell: I think what people are going to see is the continual evolution of our American, modern aesthetic. We will continue to make things a little dressier, because we love mixing dressy with casual while still keeping it very comfortable. We want to focus on comfort.
Bob: Since it’s our 25th anniversary, we have used silver as a major accent in a lot of our pieces, whether it’s silver accents on case goods or upholstered pieces and also incorporating it into our fabrics.
What’s your favorite part of being in the design world?
Mitchell: I hate to say this, but creating furniture. We are constantly redoing our own home and updating it with our newest things. One of the things we like to do is live with our own furniture so we can make sure it’s comfortable and functions the way we wanted it to be.
