Showroom

BY RAEANNE MARSH

PHOTOGRAPHY BY SCOTT SANDLER

>>> Alexander Sinclair Design Showroom, Scottsdale, Arizona

For 12 Years, Sylvia Lorts applied her degree in interior design to working directly with homeowners. "But vendors kept asking if I would have a showroom," she recalls. So in 2001, Alexander Sinclair Design Showroom was born.

Lorts, who owns the company with her husband Mike, started Alexander Sinclair Designs with lighting and beds, and gradually expanded it to a full range of furniture and accessories. Now with 32 lines, the showroom always has something new to display. That's because Lorts periodically gives the showroom a floor-to-ceiling makeover. "We keep it fresh. Designers like to be stimulated, too." At the showroom, now located in the Arizona Design Center, high-end lines are represented as well as mid-price ones, and include Burton James, Stanford Furniture, Swaim, and Edward Ferrell and Lewis Mittman's EFLM. In fact, Lorts recently hosted an event at the showroom to introduce EFLM's latest collection, Pure, a line of green furnishings. Organic mattresses from Oliver Kole were the featured subject at another seminar.

Lorts regularly sponsors ASID and IFDA events, making natural use of the showroom display items. "We'll have 40 or 50 people sitting around on the dining chairs," she says.

One of the tables gathered 'round in the Alexander Sinclair showroom for that night might be the one made of exotic cherry wood, putting its special features up close and prominent: the fine, chiseled edge all the way around and the inlaid 24-karat gold trim.

The showroom displays a fresh sense of elegance.

Above the dining tables hang chandeliers that range from symmetrical, crystal-draped elegance to wrought-iron traditional. Manufacturer Red Fern Lighting also supplies Alexander Sinclair with sconces and other chandeliers that feature their glass-blown pendants. An edgier look comes from 2nd Ave. Design Lighting: contemporary frenzy contained in a tall bramble of a chandelier that is somewhat evocative of a tornado (and is named "whirly twirly").

For 2nd Ave., Alexander Sinclair is a preview ground. It is one of the newer companies Lorts seeks out to expand her collection. Other new companies Lorts showcases include Jacquard Textiles and Jacobsen & Balla, providing Lorts' latest showroom additions of fabrics and wallcoverings, respectively.

Jacobsen & Balla produces its papers in full-spectrum color, providing designers with the greatest versatility in developing a room's color scheme. Other aspects of the wallcoverings that Lorts finds exciting is the company's use of recycled paper to apply color to their canvases, and then the redevelopment of those papers into another product of carefully pieced patchwork design.

Lorts' eclectic, multi-line collection offers such pieces as a mirrored vanity/desk from Mario Grimaldi International, a California company that supplies to such iconic hotels as the Bellagio in Las Vegas.

One-of-a-kind pieces make their limited appearance as well. A Brazilian cheese table recently appeared on the showroom floor with a surface that mutely spoke of the art of cheesemaking through the deep groove carved across its top. Then there was the African ladder carved from a tree trunk that, mounted on a base, serves a new purpose as an accessory.

Some Alexander Sinclair accessories serve as functional art. These include a porcelain-finished platter by ceramicist Tom Wallach, whose artistry features patterns in crystals that he grew in the kiln as the piece was fired; and a silver-leaf serving dish that can go from freezer to table. "Some decorative pieces that we order from Italy can be requested as a food-safe product," says Lorts.

Elsewhere in the showroom hang spectacularly expressive artworks created, surprisingly, from nature's bounty, such as paper-thin "penny" seeds, flowers, mushrooms, birch bark and lichen. These are produced by the James Co., a husband-and-wife team who have developed a process that preserves their sources' rich natural colors.

Alexander Sinclair is strictly to the trade. Appointments are appreciated, although they are not necessary. "We like to get to know the designers and their projects," says Lorts. "It's the only way to get to know what their needs are."

Alexander Sinclair Design Showroom, 7350 N. Dobson Road, Suite 126, Scottsdale, AZ 85256; (480) 423-8000.