Would you buy furniture from Brad Pitt?

In its latest issue, Architectural Digest debuts Brad Pitt — actor, father, all-around Hollywood hunk — as a furniture designer.

That’s right. Pitt — the guy who makes women swoon from their movie seats, who routinely makes it on magazines’ lists of sexiest men alive and most powerful celebrities in Hollywood, who was once engaged to Gwyneth Paltrow, married to and divorced from Jennifer Aniston, and a strong proponent of same-sex marriage  (he has said in several interviews that he would marry Angelina Jolie when “everyone in America is legally able to marry,” and who once facetiously introduced director Quentin Tarantino during an awards show in “five non-linear parts” (okay, it takes a second to get it) — is now a furniture designer.

Pitt’s love of architecture, design and sustainability is well chronicled. In 2006, he founded Make it Right Foundation, which built 150 environmentally friendly new houses for Hurricane Katrina victims in New Orleans. Pitt worked with 13 architectural firms and Global Green USA and several of the firms did it for free.

For his own home, Pitt is known to have bought furniture pieces from renowned Filipino designer Kenneth Cobonpue years ago. Pitt bought in 2005 Cobonpue’s Voyage bed, a cradle-like bed made from buri and abaca for himself and Angelina Jolie, and commissioned a Voyage baby crib for their first biological child, Shiloh Nouvel Jolie Pitt. He also bought Cobonpue’s  red lounge chair, a gorgeous piece made from polycotton fabric twisted around galvanized and powder-coated steel.  

Perhaps it was on the set of Ocean’s Thirteen that Pitt first fell in love with Cobonpue’s designs. After all, the Filipino designer furnished one set in the movie.

And now, Pitt is a designer himself.  Or, as he tells Architectural Digest — and we imagine that he does this with his irresistible smile — “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.”

In collaboration with furniture maker Frank Pollaro, Pitt launched last month in New York a dozen furniture pieces, ranging from tables to chairs and a bed. Pitt designed them and Pollaro produced them. Pollaro’s firm is famous for Art Deco reproduction furniture and that was how Pitt met him.

Ubiquitously missing from his collection is a sofa. But perhaps that’s not his style, maybe he’s more of a club chair kind of guy.

According to Architectural Digest, “Pitt’s passion for architecture and design is well established, evidenced by his Make it Right Foundation, which enlists prominent architects to create quality affordable housing in post-Katrina New Orleans, as well as by his high-profile collecting of modernist and contemporary furniture. But it wasn’t until he met Pollaro that he seriously considered making his own furnishings. When Pollaro paid Pitt a visit to install a reproduction Ruhlmann desk the actor had commissioned a few years ago, he spotted Pitt’s sketchbook, filled with drawings of furniture designs. Pollaro didn’t hesitate. ‘I asked him, Why don’t we make some of this stuff real? he recalls. Brad said he thought that could be fun.’”

Architectural Digest continues the saga between the designer and former client and now collaborator, “They started with a bed — an Art Deco ocean liner of  a bed, featuring a lustrous tropical hardwood frame that extends from its gently curved headboard, along the floor, to a graceful arc that ends in a cantilevered bench capable of seating, one imagines, the entire Jolie-Pitt clan. Refinements include exposed nickel trusses to support the king-size mattress, integrated shagreen foot pads, and nickel side tables with silk-under-glass tops that seem more suited for cocktails than alarm clocks. It took Pollaro and his team more than two years to make the piece, in part because of ‘difficult physics and engineering issues related to the simplicity of the design,’ he says. Once it was completed, he and Pitt agreed it should be exhibited. But not just the bed — a whole collection of Pitt’s creations. And their partnership was born.”

The magazine quotes Pollaro as saying Pitt has “literally thousands” of designs, which they had to whittle down to a handful to produce.

“Describing himself as ‘bent on quality to an unhealthy degree,’ Pitt says Pollaro ‘embodies the same mad spirit of craftsmen of yore, with their obsessive attention to detail. It so happens that Frank and I speak the same language. And we both have a predilection for far too much wine.’”

One can imagine the meetings that went between the two, which AD describes “as lasting anywhere from seven to 10 hours.”

P

itt’s furnishings include a dining table, chairs, side tables, a cocktail table, a bathtub for two, and club chairs.

Architectural Digest asks Pitt about “the appeal of an uninterrupted line” (one of his designs is a 17-foot-long dining table). Pitt says, “It started with my introduction to Mackintosh’s Glasgow rose, which is drawn with one continuous line. But for me, there is something more grand at play, as if you could tell the story of one’s life with a single line.”

Brad Pitt’s life and career has been anything but a single, straight line. While many remember seeing him first as the sexy conman in the ultimate gal-pal road film Thelma & Louise in 1991, he began appearing onscreen as early as the ’80s but the parts were so small he was uncredited. Who knew he was in No Way Out or Less Than Zero?  Of course, this Shawnee, Oklahoma native is as famous for his movie roles as he is for his love life. He may be one of the very few men in the world that divided women into two teams during the early stage of his affair with Angelina Jolie and divorce from Jennifer Aniston.

This new name —Pollaro — now hyphenated with Pitt’s (it is literally hyphenated in their website, www.pitt-pollaro.com) is less controversial. Just two weeks ago,  Pitt and Pollaro launched their website while Pollaro maintains his own custom furniture company website (www.pollaro.com).

“Designed by Pitt. Made by Pollaro. Made in USA.”

So, would you buy a chair from Brad Pitt?