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The cover of the 1983-84 Best catalog
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The former Best Products headquarters, located at 1400 Best Plaza Drive in Henrico County, featured a pair of salvaged limestone eagles.
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Best Product’s “Forest Building” at 9008 Quioccasin Road is now home to the West End Presbyterian Church.
What happens when a retailer gives free rein to artists when designing stores? The answer goes on display at The Branch Museum of Design, May 7 through June 21, in “Imagining Best Products.”
If you’re new here, or younger, you may not recall the Richmond-based catalog showroom Best Products, founded in 1957 by Sydney and Frances Lewis. The firm folded in 1997 as catalog retailing went out of vogue, but the Lewis legacy is immense.
At its height during the late 1980s, the company operated more than 200 retail and separate jewelry stores in 27 states. Most of these were big boxes adorned with the iconic red “Best” logo, but a handful were special.
Thanks to the stores’ success (annual sales reached $2 billion), the Lewises were able to support artists who were just beginning their careers, often combining cash contributions with items such as color televisions and refrigerators that were valuable to geniuses of creativity living in meager circumstances. Some of the artists they encouraged included Andy Warhol, Chuck Close, Jasper Johns and Roy Lichtenstein.
The Lewises also collected works by emerging mid-20th-century makers. They donated those acquisitions to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and supported its 1985 West Wing expansion, among other contributions. The VMFA’s Best Café is even named after the former company.
“Imagining Best Products” is curated by Don O’Keefe, architect and lecturer in architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. He also runs the website Architecture Richmond, which he co-organized with the late Ed Slipek Jr.; Slipek assisted in the early planning stages of “Imagining Best.”
The exhibition presents models of stores (both built and planned), original drawings, films, an introduction to the life and legacy of the Lewises, and organized field trips to a former building site.
“I’ve been on the advisory board of The Branch and involved in a peripheral way for a while,” O’Keefe explains. “It’s my contention that Best Products is arguably the most significant story in architecture and design to come out of Virginia since Thomas Jefferson.” Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, among other achievements, designed the state capitol, which has since influenced the construction of classical porticoed buildings.
“The Best Products showrooms are studied in schools of architecture across the world,” O’Keefe says. “The drawings and models are collected by institutions like the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the [Centre] Pompidou in Paris. I think that, in some ways, people abroad may be more aware of it than we are.”
Best Products architecture took a giant leap forward from 1972 through 1984 with the creation of distinguished and elaborate facades for nine stores across six states.
“The Lewises decided to put their money where their mouths were and bring art into the suburbs,” O’Keefe says. “The facades were wild, but the inside [was] a typical showroom. The Lewises also put art from their collection in them for people to experience.”
To carry out the vision of stylized flagship stores, in the early ’70s, Best commissioned James Wines and his firm, Sculpture In The Environment, aka SITE. “Wines was originally a sculptor, and that’s how the Lewises met him,” O’Keefe says. “He later turned to architecture, and he was kind of an outsider in the field. Some architects didn’t take his work seriously and looked at it as conceptual art.”
Wines and SITE designed 11 Best buildings. The concept can’t be described as completely altruistic, as an eye-catching facade could drive sales. O’Keefe cites the Houston location’s “Indeterminate Facade,” or the “Crumbling Alamo” of 1975, as an example. That store received a dramatic reveal as a pair of helicopters pulled away a giant black drape to expose its jagged roofline and a dangerous-looking cascade of bricks.
“Sales at that showroom jumped 40%,” O’Keefe explains. “People would see the showroom and run in and buy a toaster.”
Meanwhile, the 1971 “Peeling Building” grabbed the attention of Richmonders. The brick facade of the Midlothian Turnpike Beaufont Mall store (across from the former Cloverleaf Mall) appeared to be coming off — or getting stuck on — the structure, like an adhesive for a package mailer.
The “Forest Building,” at 9008 Quioccasin Road, in 1979 displayed a concern for the environment that is more familiar today. “Specialists spent months on the building site, re-training the roots of the trees to grow away from structural footings and foundations,” David Douglass-Jaimes wrote in a 2015 ArchDaily post, “and preserving the natural undergrowth, allowing nature and architecture to coexist.”
Now home to the West End Presbyterian Church, the “Forest Building” is the only SITE-created Best structure still standing as designed. The others are demolished or bereft of what made them special.
The timing of “Imagining Best” coincides with the recent deaths of Frances Lewis, at age 103, and Slipek, who worked in media relations for Best, as well as Henrico County’s announcement that Best’s long-empty headquarters building off Parham Road near I-95 will be demolished this year. Designed by Malcolm Holzman of Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates (now Steinberg Hart), the structure has a curved, tiled facade that could’ve been a fanciful resort.
The exhibition is an exploration of the power of architecture. O’Keefe explains, “The Branch asks us to consider the importance of design in our lives.”
