Ralph Kylloe Rustic Living
At Home in the Adirondacks 2014
House of Style
For decades taste-maker Ralph Kylloe has helped define Adirondack rustic
Photograph by Erin Reid Coker
The first thing you hear upon approaching the Ralph Kylloe Gallery is a dog barking. Quickly, it is dogs barking, plural. The long log-cabin structure on Route 9N in Lake George, just outside Lake Luzerne, specializes in rustic furniture and antiques. It is the principal showroom—and also the home—of Ralph and Michelle Kylloe, who together have nurtured a furniture style that's as old as the hills and long associated with Adirondack Great Camps. Remarkably, it is a style—rustic—that continues to renew itself and widen its appeal.
Ralph Kylloe, a ruddy, solid man with a head of gray hair, greets me just inside the screen door with a nod. He recalls an earlier visit and shakes hands. Michelle, his wife, excuses herself from dealing with a customer to say hello and asks for a few moments to finish up. The dogs are quiet now, no doubt used to business in the shop. Then I hear another sound: a bluesy guitar riff. It is Ralph, sitting on a bench, playing slide on a gleaming dobro guitar. He is intent on the music. I decide to look around.
There is a lot to look at in this 6,000-square-foot, one-story building that is two-thirds showroom stocked with furniture and accessories and one-third living space. In the showroom proper, there are antique creels, pack baskets, snowshoes and canoes (aloft) amidst early-20th-century cherry tables, birch-accented chests, hickory chairs and rockers. Then there are the newly crafted pieces by local artisans. Prices in the gallery range from a $14 metal hook to ornate cabinets and bureaus and beds that might run $30,000. I catch a reflection of myself in a hall mirror set in a pipe-organ thicket of hickory poles. I want this.
Ralph Kylloe, now 67, suffered a stroke four years ago and does not speak much anymore. Michelle, 55, deals with clientele—at the moment, a man from Huletts Landing is just leaving with three hickory rocking chairs from the 1930s. The transaction concludes when Ralph helps the man strap a tarp over the bed of his truck. Summer rain is coming.
"It's his reading and his speech," Michelle says as the three of us sit down to talk at a beautiful tiger-maple-and-yellow-birch table. "He understands all right"—Ralph nods vigorously in agreement—"if he can break things down. Music and math, fine. But the flow of conversation is like another language."
These two, however, have worked the same passion and business for so long they speak the same language. On this occasion, Michelle speaks for both of them.
Their definition of the rustic tradition is simple: "Ralph always says that it is furniture or art that is manipulated as little as possible, using natural shapes and native materials—roots, trees and burls—leaving them relatively intact, doing what you need to do to make them functional, but as little as possible."
Asked if they considered the style regional or even American, Ralph contributes a string of adjectives—"African, Mexican, Japanese, Chinese, Russian"—citing those as cultures with historical rustic practices.
Making a table out of a tree stump or turning over a rock to form a seat is perhaps an inevitable early stage of any regional human design. But how and why did it become a style—not only a category of antique that is popular but an aesthetic that continues to inspire contemporary artisans, particularly in the Adirondacks?
Michelle mentions the style adopted in the national parks in the 1870s—the buildings and information centers that were meant to be as near-to-natural as the landscapes they served. The fact that the founding of the parks and the birth of Adirondack Great Camps were nearly simultaneous suggests that rustic was what people who were attracted to the wilderness—whether in Wyoming or Colorado or Raquette Lake—saw as a fitting and useful style.
One thing they saw as fitting and useful was hickory.
"Hickory was a dominant material," says Michelle. "Several companies were shipping hickory furniture to the parks. The dining room and porches in the visitor centers and lodges are full of hickory chairs and tables. And so are the Adirondack camps." Clearly, there is a design and material influence at work, she says, but in which direction is hard to say. In their book Santanoni, Robert Engel, Howard Kirschenbaum and Paul Malo credit railroad baron William West Durant for establishing the style that "served as a model for the national parks and state park buildings, as well as for private retreats elsewhere." Durant built his first rustic cabins in Raquette Lake in 1876; the first true national park—Yellowstone—was created only four years earlier.
"But no one really knows," says Michelle, and Ralph inclines his head to agree.
Ralph Kylloe and Michelle Keller met at a trade show in the early 1990s. Ralph, who grew up in a Swedish section of Chicago, was a business major at Southern Illinois University and a photographer for the college paper—he took photos of the Doors and the Grateful Dead and other bands that came through in the late 1960s. After earning a doctorate in education from Boston University, Ralph took a tangential path by teaching outdoor education—kayaking, canoeing, orienteering and rock-climbing—at Tufts University in Boston. It was there that he picked up the antiques and furniture restoration bug, becoming a dealer on the side, driving his truck to flea markets in New England. Michelle, also from Chicago (though they did not know each other there), started out in window display and then worked for a wholesale floral company that sold to department stores. "We did the seasonal trims—dry flowers, spring flowers, Christmas trims, garlands, giant arrangements for Macy's for their cosmetics ledges." It brought her to New York twice a year. "I was buying what Ralph was selling," she says. "We kept in touch, and then I came East."
Fittingly, Ralph proposed marriage at Old Faithful, in Yellowstone National Park. That was 20 years ago.
It was a good match. "With my background in display I knew the visual merchandising people while Ralph knew the other end"—where to get things and who was making them. Ralph and Michelle began doing business with the likes of Timberland, Eddie Bauer, Ralph Lauren and Bass Pro Shops. "They all saw Ralph's stuff and loved it for their store displays and photo shoots," says Michelle.
Increasingly, they found themselves talking to clients who had places in the Adirondacks. "We were meeting people at our booth at the Javits Center and they all had places up here." Ralph had become friends with interior decorator Barbara Collum, who has a place on Little Moose Lake in Old Forge. "What Ralph has accomplished is phenomenal," says Collum. For 40 years she has been buying pieces from him—for herself and for clients. "In the early '70s you couldn't find Adirondack-style furniture [to buy] anywhere. Forget it. But Ralph was collecting it, and his books became the point of reference for rustic design all over the country."
In 1996 the Kylloes moved to Lake George from New Hampshire, where they had run an antiques business out of their house. "We thought about Lake Placid," Michelle says, "but we wanted to be a little more accessible. A lot of our clients fly into the Albany airport, or even Glens Falls." So they bought a plot of land a bit west of the Northway and built their gallery/home.
Today, the bulk of the Kylloes' business remains in the Adirondacks, although they also do work for clients all over the world. "Over 20 or 30 years, demand has increased, yes," says Michelle. "Antiques are harder to find, as more people—thanks to Ralph, in many ways—are now collecting." And though there are fewer clients who might want an entire place in the rustic or Adirondack style, there are many more who are opting to decorate "the second TV room in rustic, or the library." As a result, there remains a strong business both in the aforementioned "accessories"—the creels and snowshoes and oars and canoes, which are generally antiques—and in new pieces from talented artisans, many of whom have benefited from Ralph's enthusiasm and delivery of eager buyers.
"There is always room for—and need for—new craftsmen," says Michelle. Over the years the Kylloes have worked with many artisans, including Barney Bellinger, Chris Wager, Peter Winter and Maine's Randy Holden. Jonathan Swartwout, who works out of Johnstown, New York, is the latest to benefit from the Kylloe touch. He says, "I'd always been a painter and almost everything I did was about fishing. After college, about 10 years ago, I was still painting and making a little furniture. Someone told me to call Ralph. I did." Swartwout visited the gallery. "When I walked in I was ignorant of the whole rustic style. The place was overwhelming." Kylloe bought six of Swartwout's trout paintings. "He went out of his way for me," says Swartwout, who is also making furniture for the Kylloes. "It's my living now."
Outside, a heavy afternoon rain is falling and the dogs resume barking—two customers are at the door. Our interview wraps up and Michelle readies to greet them. She shushes the dogs. Ralph picks up his guitar.
Find the Ralph Kylloe Gallery (518-696-4100, www.ralphkylloe.com) at 1796 Route 9N, in Lake George.
Tags: Adirondack furniture, Adirondack style, Ralph Kylloe
This entry was posted on Thursday, November 6th, 2014 at 11:40 am and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can trackback from your own site.
Source: https://adirondacklifemag.com/blogs/2014/11/06/house-style/
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