Known as 'King of Lucite', American designer Charles Hollis Jones focused his entire career on creating highly extravagant, transparent bespoke furniture pieces to become a leader of 1970s Hollywood interior glamour. Last week, Jones died at the age of 81.
I met Jones in his studio in Burbank, California in 2016. He showed me around his creative space and talked about his prolific career. He was just 16 years old when he moved from his native Indiana to Los Angeles, where he founded his own brand, CHJ. From the beginning he started to specialize in then innovative material – Lucite (a specific, brand name for acrylic material) – and imagined unique sculptural interior objects, which soon gained considerable attention of wealthy clients. Frank Sinatra, Lucille Ball, Johnny Carson, Steve McQueen and Dean Martin were among some celebrities to commission Jones to design pieces for their homes.
Other famous clients followed including Diana Ross, Johnny Mathis, Muhammad Ali, Sylvester Stallone and Kelly Lynch.
'Lucite was not my first choice. I really loved glass, but it could not do what I wanted it to do, so I decided to devote my career to acrylic instead,' said Jones about his material choice which defined his entire oeuvre.
Lucite was not my first choice. I really loved glass, but it could not do what I wanted it to do, so I decided to devote my career to acrylic instead
Charles Hollis Jones
Besides famous Hollywood celebrities, Jones also started to collaborate with the leading interior decorators and architects of his time, including Arthur Elrod, Paul László, Hal Broderick and John Lautner, with whom he collaborated on more than a dozen of projects.
The memorable collaboration with Lautner was very important for Jones, who showed me many pictures of the original interiors furnished for Lautner. He created hundreds of acrylic furniture pieces for Lautner's projects, including few pieces for the legendary residence of interior decorator Arthur Elrod in Palm Springs in 1969. This desert concrete house then became a cultural icon of the 1960s when it appeared in James Bond's Diamonds are Forever movie.
After working for renowned interior showroom Hudson-Rissman in Los Angeles, Jones established his own store, offering a wide assortment of acrylic pieces, ranging from furniture and lighting to sculptural objects and accessories. One of his most iconic designs of the late 1960s and early 1970s is without a doubt the Edison Lamp, created in 1970. The transparency of the lamp pays tribute to the original Thomas Edison's light bulb, leaving it exposed to be admired as a piece of technology.
Jones also collaborated with country musician Tennessee Williams, for whom he created signature Wisteria chair in 1968. Composed of intersecting sheets of acrylic, the chair is the abstract sculptural composition of almost invisible appearance, as most of the transparent acrylic Jones's pieces, including award-winning collections Fleur de Lis, Waterfall or Metric.
Since the early 1980s, Jones continued to produce and sell acrylic pieces in his showrooms but mostly directly to his clients and interior decorators. Later on, his work was largely forgotten until the early 2000s, when it began to show up in the secondary market. Today, most of Jones's vintage pieces are rare collectibles and Jones himself is considered as one of the most important figures of the 20th-century American studio furniture movement.
