The Man Behind The Vision

Realizing Memories and Creating New Ones

Barlas Baylar is a New York City designer widely recognized for his minimalist furniture that integrates natural elements with modern aesthetics.  Touring the Hudson Furniture showrooms is a promenade through a world where nature has been reinterpreted by architecture even as the 21st Century yearns for millennia past.  There the evolution of chandeliers, tables, bed frames and their headboards is displayed as metal, wood, glass, and stone are reworked for furnishing civilization.  Chain chandeliers curve softly in buxom tresses with metallic accents that trace the descent of light through dripping fringe-like strands of glass.  Expiring trees are memorialized in bittersweet majesty by the solid slabs of seats.  Then there are the accessories which seem both stone and wood – petrified wood, naturally.  Yet all the floor samples only begin to suggest Baylar’s prodigious output.

Twenty-four craftsmen work to realize Baylar’s visions as the utilitarian artwork that adorns celebrity apartments and upscale boutiques alike, each piece unique and no two quite the same.  With personal experience of production design and a family tradition in machinery manufacturing, Baylar established Hudson Furniture to make use of old all-natural materials, modernizing them with industrial detail to create organic structures that can turn interiors into exteriors by simply hinting at the universe outside.  Surfaces are not just sanded down but hand-burnished with broken glass to reveal nature’s own workmanship beneath.

Concern for nature forms Baylar’s very design processes, and not only limited to detached admiration from afar.  He is deeply committed to natural conservation and only uses certifiably sustainable materials for his designs.  Nothing but domestically sourced arbor salvaged from wind and storm damage is used, with favorite species such as Claro Walnut, Black Walnut, Myrtle, Jasmine, Acacia, Satinwood, and Ebonized Pine only removed by their rightful owners to prevent damage to houses or other trees.  Nothing is wasted: scraps and leftovers of every irregularity are reintegrated.  And from the connections formed through family ties and personal experience in various industries, he is sure of the origins of his materials, with even the official approval of embassies and consulates sought where matters of necessary imports are concerned.  In fact, his firm is proud to be the city’s sole repository for legally harvested petrified wood.  And thus shall Baylar’s geometric designs, traditional joinery techniques, and hand-rubbed oil finishes continue returning to nature – only to emerge once more for the furnishing of civilization.  Hudson Furniture is, in this sense, “recycled” furniture.