Who He Is

Designing for the Present by Looking into the Past.

Barlas Baylar is the renowned New York City designer of minimalist furniture combining natural elements with modern aesthetics.  Touring his Hudson Furniture showrooms is a promenade through a world where nature is reinterpreted by architecture as the 21st Century dreams of millennia past.  There the evolution of chandeliers, tables, bed frames and their headboards is displayed in metal, wood, glass, and stone, everything recreated to furnish civilization.  Chain chandeliers softly curve in buxom tresses of metallic accenting which trace the descent of light through glass strands dripping like fringe off a sleeve.  The bittersweet majesty of expiring trees is memorialized forever by the solid slabs of seats.  Then there are the accessories appearing as both stone and wood – petrified wood, naturally.  Yet all the floor samples only scratch at the surface of Baylar’s prodigious output.

Twenty-four craftsmen labor to reify Baylar’s dreams into the utilitarian artwork that can be found in celebrity apartments and upscale boutiques alike, each piece unique and no two exactly the same.  With a personal experience in production design and a family tradition in machinery manufacturing, Baylar founded Hudson Furniture to utilize old all-natural materials, modernized with industrial detail to make for organic structures that turn interiors into exteriors by only hinting at the universe without.  Surfaces are not simply sanded down, but are burnished with broken glass to reveal nature’s own workmanship underneath.

Concern for nature is part of Baylar’s design processes, and not just detached admiration of her from afar.  He is committed to the preservation of nature and uses only sustainable materials in his works.  Nothing but dead and dying lumber, sourced domestically of salvaged arbor damaged by wind and storm, is used, with favorite species such as Claro Walnut, Black Walnut, Myrtle, Jasmine, Acacia, Satinwood, and Ebonized Pine removed by rightful owners only to prevent damage to houses or other trees.  Not a thing is wasted: scraps and leftovers of every irregularity are reintegrated into every design.  And from the connections developed through family ties and personal experience in different industries, Hudson Furniture can be sure of the origins of its materials, with even the official approval of embassies and consulates where matters of necessary imports are involved.  In fact, his firm is proud to be the city’s sole repository for legally harvested petrified wood.  And thus will Baylar’s geometric designs, traditional joinery techniques, and hand-rubbed oil finishes continue to return to nature and emerge again to clothe civilization.