The Design District

Posted By Rachel DeSchepper on 01/17/2008

Janus Home is a new mid-century vintage home furnishings store at SW 12th and Alder. If you love high-quality, mid-century vintage from the 1950s through the 1970s (as I do), this will be your playground. Owner Jeremy Schneyer has a great eye; he purchases and professionally restores tables, chairs, sofas, sideboards, lighting and more to near mint condition. You should definitely stop by, and soon.

I took a stroll through Janus Home—the space is neatly curated, well lit and feels very much like the high-end store it is. But Jeremy’s down-to-earth nature and knowledge of the market makes it a comfortable shopping experience. I chatted with him about how he and his wife, Kelly, ended up here in Portland, what’s in store for the future of Janus Home, and he even divulged a few shopping hints.

Tell me how you ended up in Portland.

I was part owner of two shops in Seattle over the past five years. The first was called Patina and was located in Fremont. The second was called Collective and started out as more of antique mall, but when Patina closed, I started to bring a lot more mid-century stuff into Collective and it became a bit of a destination store for people looking for mid-century furniture in Seattle.

Shortly after we opened Collective, my wife and I took a trip to Portland and thought “gee, wouldn’t it be nice to move here?” However, we had a business to run and promptly forgot about it. Fast forward three years, and Kelly and I decided that we need to leave the business. The thought then germinated in my head “what about Portland?” We took an exploratory trip down here to check it out and everything just fell into place. Two months later we had bought a house here and opened the shop.

I think Portland has a very strong and vibrant design scene (much more so than Seattle) that was wide open for someone to bring in really imaginative, high quality mid-century/vintage furniture.

Have you always had a love for mid-century, vintage pieces?

“Always” would be stretching it. My parents had a lot of Danish Modern furniture when I was growing up (most of which they still have), but I didn’t really start paying attention to it until I was already in the business. One day I went to visit my parents, and said “wow, you guys have really great furniture! Why didn’t I ever notice it before?” I started out in the “old stuff” business by going to auctions and estate sales, and selling what I found at flea markets and on eBay. After a year or so of doing this and being exposed to all kinds of different stuff, I realized that I was naturally drawn to mid-century furniture and design, and haven’t looked back since.

Where did the name, Janus Home, come from?

Janus is the Roman God of beginnings and endings. I liked the symbolism of beginnings and endings, what with the restoration and recycling of furniture that I do, as well as the fact that moving to Portland was the end of our life in Seattle and very much a new beginning for Kelly and me.

What’s in stock at Janus Home?

I would say that 80- to 90-percent of my stock dates from the ‘50s through the ‘70s. However, I like to mix that up with everything from antique industrial pieces to interesting found objects of indeterminate age (I have an antique hay rake wheel hanging on a wall in my shop). On the other end, some of the high-end design from the 1980s has come back into vogue in the past several years, with designers like Karl Springer and manufacturers like Saporiti Italia commanding top dollar in New York and LA showrooms. While I don’t have any of these pieces currently in stock, I will certainly be on the lookout for them as well.

Any favorite shows or sources to find great vintage pieces?

What, you want me to give away my trade secrets? No, seriously, the standard answer to this is “auctions and estate sales,” but I’ve discovered since moving down here that Portland seems to be severely lacking in auction houses, and so far every estate sale I’ve gone to has had nothing but overpriced antiques. So, having said that, eBay is actually a phenomenal resource for finding vintage pieces. True, you have to pay for shipping, and you can’t try out a piece before you buy it, but if you know what you’re looking for, eBay can be great. I have yet to find many great sources in Portland, but I’m sure they will come.

Who’s your favorite furniture designer?

Truthfully, I don’t have a single favorite furniture designer – there are too many to choose from! Also, I fall in love with individual pieces, not necessarily with a designer’s whole body of work. Having said that, some of my favorite designers include Hans Wegner, Edward Wormley, T.H. Robsjohn Gibbings, Finn Juhl and Sergio Rodrigues. I also adore modern craft furniture, from designers like George Nakashima, Wharton Esherick and Phil Powell. Somewhat in that vein, there’s a Brazilian architect and designer named Jose Zanine Caldas whose work is extremely interesting – he was one of the first guys to go out into the jungle and haul out fallen logs and make furniture out of them. He made these absolutely massive, brutalist, organic pieces. Zanine died several years ago, but his son, Zanini, is carrying on his father’s work, and is preparing for a big show in Los Angeles next year.

Basically, I love any designer that can take a simple, timeless form and add their own subtle details to distinguish it from every other exponent of that form.

Ok, if you can’t quite pin down a favorite designer let’s try this: Do you have a particular favorite furniture style?

Although it’s not very cool in the high-end furniture world at the moment, I really do have a soft spot for Danish Modern. I love the quality and detail that went into the best examples of this style, as well as the sinuous, organic, highly sculptural elements that often went into the designs. I also very much admire the simple, clean, yet meticulously detailed designs of American modernists like Edward Wormley and T.H. Robsjohn Gibbings.

Do you have any easy quick tips for people wanting to start buying original mid-century pieces?

The devil is in the details! You can tell a lot about a piece of furniture by looking at the joinery and the corners: Is the construction tight and well executed? Are the corners shaped and rounded nicely or just kind of chunked together? Learn to tell your woods apart. It’s easy to learn to tell the difference between higher-quality woods like teak and walnut from lower quality woods like birch, which have been stained dark to look like nicer woods. Learn to distinguish solid wood pieces from veneered pieces. (Ninety-five percent of all mid century furniture is veneered, which is certainly not a bad thing – however, a lot of people claim the piece they’re selling is “solid wood” when it’s not.)

Look for a piece with a nice line over a lesser piece that’s in great condition. The bones are more important than the skin – a great piece in shabby condition can always be reupholstered or refinished to look new, but a clunky, low-quality piece can never be turned into a great piece.

What’s in the five-year plan for Janus Home?

We have big plans! Within the year, we plan on securing a warehouse space which will be open by appointment. At this location, we will have a large selection of fabrics, as well as in-house upholstery services. The idea is that a client would be able to come to the warehouse, pick out a frame that they like, pick out fabric from our selection, and have a finished, custom upholstered piece ready for them within a few weeks. We will also be available for design consultations in conjunction with these services (as it’s not always easy to pick out fabric for a piece!).

Once we have the warehouse and have the funds available to do so, we also plan on bringing in containers of hand-picked furniture from places like Denmark and Brazil. We already have the connections to do this, but just having opened, we do not yet have the capital or the customer base to support such a venture. However, we hope to be able to make this happen within the next few years.

Finally, I’m also in the process of writing a book, which will probably be called (imaginatively enough) “Decorating with Vintage.” It will be sort of a how-to, hands-on guide to finding, identifying, restoring and decorating with vintage and mid-century modern furniture.

Janus Home 537 SW 12th Ave 503-227-8802 Wednesday-Saturday, 12-5 p.m., other times by appointment.