“We’re hoping to be the highest sales-per-square-foot Drexel store in the country,” said Bill Mathis, president of the Top 100 retailer and a partner in the business with his brother Larry Mathis. The new store is managed by Mathis Bros.’ Becky Page, who also manages the retailer’s Thomasville Home Furnishings store in the same shopping center. In the middle of the store is Drexel’s design center and rounded fabric wall. Sisal carpet is laid to match the track of the highest ceilings to help pull consumers into the niches and inspiration rooms. For the opening, the store went with Drexel’s Ivory Coast bedroom from Signatures, a year-old collection featured in Drexel’s national advertising.Ĭeiling levels vary in the store to best suit the settings - 12 feet and finished in the foyer, 10 feet in the lifestyle rooms for better perspective, and 16 feet exposed in the middle of the store. The front foyer is dedicated to whatever is new and appropriate for the region. This fall, the store will host Drexel’s “A Taste for Living” event focusing on holiday entertaining, dining tables and tabletop display. The range of vintage Drexel furniture for sale on 1stDibs includes end tables designed by Edward Wormley, walnut side tables designed by Kipp Stewart and lots more.The niche and inspiration rooms areas also double as special events rooms to hold events and seminars. In 2014, the last Drexel Heritage plant, in Morganton, North Carolina, reportedly closed its doors.
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Plywood-Champion Papers bought Drexel Enterprises in 1968, and it became Drexel Heritage Furnishings. In the following decades, contracts with government agencies, hotels, schools and hospitals brought its high-quality furniture to a global audience. Its acquisition of Southern Desk Company in 1960 bolstered its production of institutional furniture for dormitories, classrooms, churches and laboratories.
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By 1957, the company that had started with a factory of 50 workers had 2,300 employees and was selling its furniture nationwide.ĭrexel underwent a series of name changes in its long history. With the manufacturer’s success - spurred by its embrace of advertising in home and garden magazines - it opened more factories in both North and South Carolina. It was then that the company began to expand, with several acquisitions of competitors in the 1950s, including Table Rock Furniture, the Heritage Furniture Co. It was managed by one of the original partners - Samuel Huffman - until 1935, at which time his son Robert O. In the 1970s, Drexel introduced high-end furniture in a Mediterranean style.ĭrexel changed hands and visions throughout the years.
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In the postwar era, Drexel embraced the clean lines of mid-century modernism with the Declaration collection designed by Stewart MacDougall and Kipp Stewart that featured elegant credenzas and more made in walnut and the Profile and Projection collections designed with sculptural shapes by John Van Koert. Always ready to adapt to new customer demands, during World War II, Drexel built a sturdy desk designed especially for General Douglas MacArthur. Others replicated the ornate details of 18th-century chinoiserie or the embellishments of Queen Anne furniture. This included making pieces inspired by historic European furniture, like the popular French provincial–style Touraine bedroom and dining group that borrowed its curves from Louis XV-era furniture. This focus on design, which few other furniture companies were committing to at the time, allowed Drexel to respond to a variety of new and traditional tastes. One of Drexel’s early innovations was to employ staff designers, something the company initiated in the 1930s.
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The first offerings from Drexel Furniture were simple: a bed, washstand and bureau all crafted from native oakwood, sold as a bedroom suite for $14.50. In 1903, in the small town of Drexel in the foothills of North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains, six partners came together to found a company that would become one of the country’s leading furniture producers. While vintage Drexel Furniture dining tables, dressers and other pieces remain highly desirable for enthusiasts of mid-century modern design, the manufacturer's story actually begins decades before its celebrated postwar-era Declaration line took shape.