David Larabee is a maker at heart. After a stint in telecom during the dotcom boom to fi nance his furniture-making aspirations, he partnered with Dexter Thornton to launch DoubleButter, a high-end furniture company based in Denver. “Working with my hands has always been my favorite kind of work: work that doesn’t feel like work,” Larabee says. “When the world quiets down, my mind drifts to design.” After leaving the corporate world, Larabee began crafting pieces for his apartment—designs he thought would appeal to people like his former tech self—and launched a website. He quickly connected with a few retail shops before opening his own showroom in Baker. We visited his space to learn more about the furniture and its maker. Here’s what he had to say:
By any other name: “The name DoubleButter came from an off-hand comment my partner Dexter made about how he likes his English muffins: with double butter, meaning both peanut butter and regular butter. The thinking goes that regular butter loosens up the sticky, pasty peanut butter, and the peanut butter gives the regular butter a little more spine. That struck us as a good metaphor for collaboration and the happy mix of complementary materials. Plus, it’s an un-self-serious, playful name that’s memorable.”
Finding the furniture: “You can see our chairs and stools at Perdida in Wash Park, Lady Nomada in Arvada, Homegrown Tap & Dough in Ken Caryl, and My Boy Tony on Tennyson. Or better yet, come to our showroom in Baker. We’ve got examples of all our finishes and many of our catalog pieces, plus a few prototypes and some new pieces we haven’t yet added to our site.”
Inspiration strikes: “Our work is definitely Modernist—we’re big fans of the mid-century design icons like the Eameses, Jean Prouvé, and Poul Kjaerholm—but it’s got a contemporary feel too. Or at least we think so. We’re fans of contemporary artists and designers like Tom Sachs and Piet Hein Eek. Plus, we find loads of inspiration from the clean, unadorned lines of the built, engineered world.”
Sustainability factor: “We’ve long thought that the most sustainable piece of furniture is the one you never have to replace. That’s why all our pieces are built so solidly and fussed over so relentlessly. But we’re also conscious of the raw materials we use. All our hardwoods are domestically sourced from sustainable forests, our finishes are zero-VOC, and our steel is from American mills that use post-consumer scrap steel as the principal feedstock.”
Picking favorites: “My favorite piece has to be the Roadrunner, first as a wooden chair and then in all its other incarnations. It’s the first piece Dexter and I made together for our first show, the first piece of ours that Denver Art Museum added to its permanent collection, the model for our Shoefiti project of goofy street art, and the genesis for the bench stunt that first gave us some serious attention from design nerds around the world. But at the end of the day, it’s just an excellent chair—comfortable, solid, and very handsome. After making thousands of them over nearly 20 years, I’m still a big fan.”
