Furniture of the West Indies became passion for designer

While growing up, Michael Connors didn't get attached to the family furniture. It often disappeared.

His father, the late Memphis, Tenn., interior designer Jack Connors, brought home incredible pieces.

"He'd find a wonderful secretary or beautiful armoire and place it in our house and it would live there for about a year," Connors said. "Then one day it would not be there anymore and we would wonder why. At dinner that night dad would say he was so happy because he placed the armoire at a client's home in Wilson, Ark., or Northern Mississippi or Midtown Memphis and my mom would absolutely fume."

Appreciation for the fine furniture his father brought in and out of their house stuck with Connors.

"He would talk about the classicism of a piece or how French furniture had a lightness or a gracefulness one could not find in other antique furniture. When you hear this and you're 10, 12, 13 years old you pretend not to pay attention, but you're absorbing it. I think that was a big part of the influence that drove me to being not just a collector of West Indian furniture, but an authority."

Connors, 60, owner of New York's Michael Connors Gallery, which specializes in the decorative arts of the Caribbean, is the author of three books on West Indian furniture: "Caribbean Elegance," "Cuban Elegance" and his latest book, "French Island Elegance," (Harry N. Abrams, Inc.). He also designed two lines of West Indian-inspired furniture for Baker Furniture Co.

Connors was born in New York and moved in the 1950s with his family to Memphis, where his father began an interior design business, Jack Connors Inc.

Connors often went along with his dad on "what he called his 'installations' -- when the draperies were being installed or new furniture brought in or antiques placed in his client's home. I was always in the background, absorbing all of this design and interiors."

His dad also took him to Chicago on buying trips to bring truckloads of antiques to Memphis.

Connors began collecting satinwood tea caddies and tortoiseshell boxes. "I was a box nut. I loved boxes. Then that grew into furniture."

In 1972, he opened Eagull Gallery in Deer Isle, Maine, with hopes of selling his paintings. Nobody bought the paintings, but they bought the painted American furniture he used to furnish the shop.

Connors then began searching in attics, basements and barns for more antique pieces. "The furniture flew out of the gallery. That's when I really started cultivating my eye. I began understanding I could buy a chair for $200 and sell it for $400."

He was hired as the antique furniture buyer for Lord & Taylor department store in New York. "I traveled throughout the world, Southeast Asia, China. We could bring anything back and put it in the windows of Lord & Taylor. Everything sold there."

In 1987, May Co. bought Lord & Taylor. "The first thing they did was do away with what they called the 'image and prestige departments,' which included antiques and furniture."

That same year Connors opened Michael Connors Gallery. He kept his Lord & Taylor contacts. "I was bringing in Louis Philippe cherry furniture from France and beech and birch furniture from Scandinavia, Chinese wedding beds from Southeast Asia. And I was also bringing in Colonial West Indian furniture from the Caribbean."

He began to concentrate on the Caribbean furniture, which was a "new-found style. People had never even heard of it. I learned you never predict a fashion or a style. You create one."

Designers began incorporating the furniture in their rooms. "Not doing a whole room necessarily, but using one piece -- for instance, a West Indian four poster bed with mosquito netting. Or one of the West Indian planter's chairs with long extended arms. It was a new look. It made people take notice.

"It has a simple, cultivated look. It's not intricately inlaid and there is no gold ormolu or that kind of thing, but there is a sophistication to it that you don't find in primitive furniture. It's simple, but it does have an old world sophistication."

In the 18th and first half of the 19th centuries, wealthy sugar planters had fashionable softwood furniture shipped from France. After a couple of years, the humidity, tropical island insects -- the tropical woodworm and the termites -- decimated the furniture. The planters then had their estate carpenter or woodworker reproduce the furniture in the local, tropical exotic hardwoods.

"They would take mahogany, the yacca wood, saman and satinwood -- these wonderful local West Indian woods -- and reproduce an armoire or consul table or a four post bedstead. You would find African decorative motifs -- tropical West Indian floral designs like banana leaves or hibiscus leaves. Something you'd never find in Paris or anywhere else."

His first book, "Caribbean Elegance," was "more of an excuse and reason to spend time in the Caribbean, but it did help business."

Connors and his network of buyers or "pickers" still buy West Indian furniture throughout the Caribbean. "My secret is that I pay more for it than anybody else and I will not try to beat the price down.

"I absolutely enjoy discovering this stuff. For instance, I just came back from the Caribbean and I have discovered a pair of either Bajan from Barbados or Jamaican side tables. They're the prettiest pair of little tables I have ever seen. Here I am discovering -- after 20 years in the business -- pieces amounting to something you wouldn't expect to find anymore."

It's not as easy as it used to be to find Colonial West Indian furniture.

"Furniture is so rare now because of hurricanes and the destruction of the plantation great houses over time. This furniture was not collectible or recognized as part of the island patrimony or material culture. People were basically throwing it away up until 20 years ago. I've seen posts sticking out of a dumpster.

"Now it's not that way. The discovery and popularity of Colonial West Indian furniture has really been my claim to fame, I guess."

TV's Katie Couric purchased one of Connors' finds -- a West Indian bed. "These beds are high beds. They're meant to be high to facilitate air flow."

Couric isn't a tall woman. "She said, 'Michael, how on Earth am I going to get into that bed?' I told her, 'Katie, just get across the room and get a running start.' She did smile, but she then ordered me to find some bed steps."