Home With A Heart -- Life Imitates Art In Romantic, Cozy New Interior-Design Collections

Decorating with heart, some say, is the soul of design. The result is a look that makes your home warm, cozy and inviting.

Furniture manufacturers try to deliver warmth in wood pieces with a hand-crafted look. They dig into history books for examples of chairs, tables or cabinets with charming details, and they distress finishes to give them instant age. Then they romanticize their collections with stories about how the furnishings might have been used.

Two recent collections, designed around the illustrations of Mary Engelbreit and Norman Rockwell, use art to achieve the same end.

On the 100th anniversary of Rockwell's birth, Feb. 3, 1994, Stanley Furniture collaborated with five other manufacturers to create a collection based on 321 Saturday Evening Post covers from 1916 to 1963.

Rockwell's images, though contemporary when they were drawn, evoke a nostalgic feeling that Stanley wanted to bring to its furniture collection introduced to the home-furnishings market in High Point, N.C., last fall - more on this collection later.

Engelbreit probably is best known as the designer of greeting cards that appeal to 12 million people a year. Her highly graphic style depicts old-fashioned images of round-cheeked children in pattern-on-patterned backgrounds with gardens or furnishings reminiscent of your grandmother or great-grandmother, depending on your age. Some are laced with vintage quotations that speak of gentler times.

The cards have been so popular that they led to other gift items, including calendars, posters and Christmas ornaments. Now Engelbreit has moved into home furnishings, licensing her work for wall coverings and fabrics, dinnerware, ceramic clocks and tiles, throws and quilts, place mats, teapots, and a book tying it all together, "Mary Engelbreit's Home Companion" (Andrews and McMeel, $24.95). Some of her limited-edition painted furniture soon will be available.

Many of Engelbreit's fans wrote to her such things as, "I wish my house could look like the rooms on your cards."

"My own house DOES look like my cards," said the 42-year-old artist. This means that if there's a space, Mary Engelbreit can fill it. Her two-story home in a St. Louis suburb - which she shares with her husband, Philip Delano, and their two sons, Evan, 14, and Will, 11 - is a jumble of treasures accumulated from flea markets and antiques shops: knickknacks and gewgaws, prized collections such as antique children's books, and her own products, all tucked into every nook.

"I'm very visually oriented," Engelbreit said. "I like things where I can see them. Every room has some kind of collection."

A subscriber to a less-is-more look would be appalled, Engelbreit admits. "The most annoying question is, `Who dusts all this?' " she said. "You know when somebody asks, they don't get it."

Engelbreit, who loved to draw from earliest childhood, never trained formally. Instead, she worked for an artist-supply shop after high school, then for an advertising agency and had a brief stint as an artist for the St. Louis Post Dispatch. At 22, she went to New York.

When a book editor suggested that she do greeting cards, she was "hideously insulted." But she thought about it and decided there might be some fun in doing a different kind of greeting cards. Images came easily. Engelbreit feels her illustrations appeal because they show life "the way everybody wishes it was."

Rockwell mirrored America

The work of the late Norman Rockwell inspires similar feelings. His illustrations, which graced the covers of the Saturday Evening Post, have been called a mirror of American life. He depicted everything from the doughboys of World War I to man's first steps on the moon.

Even Rockwell's son, Peter, feels at home with the Stanley Furniture pieces. "It reminds me of the furniture I grew up with, the sense of color and the idea of print fabrics."

Peter was given one of the limited-edition cherry desks in the collection. The Four Freedoms desk was based on a design similar to one his mother had. Paintings depicting the Four Freedoms - from fear, from want, of speech and worship - were published by the Saturday Evening Post in 1943.

"My father didn't just use people, he used furniture as models in his paintings," Peter said.

The Rockwell collection, crafted in cherry woods and veneers, covers two popular design styles, traditional with an 18th century New England flavor, and country. The accent color is a hunter green called Stockbridge, after the town in Massachusetts where Rockwell lived the last 25 years of his life.

Some of the pieces were taken directly from a Rockwell image. One bullion-fringed, skirted easy chair, for example, is based on "Practice," an illustration of a little boy sitting on his chair and practicing the trumpet. "The chair is duplicated, with the exact upholstery pattern that's on the cover," said Robin Campbell, manager of marketing services for Stanley. "All that's missing (from the fabric pattern) is the little boy and the dog under the chair." The chair sells for $875.

Another room setting uses colors that are deep and restful - dark green, burgundy and navy with cream. The tapestry-weight fabric on the wing chair depicts Rockwell's "Sport," which celebrates fly fishing. Teamed with a plaid sofa, the look might suit a family room in a colonial home or a log cabin. The companion lamp also depicts a fly fisherman.

The Sport chair sells for $999; the sofa for $1,199; the trunk table for $1,250; the end table for $500; the drawer/door chest for $750 and the lamp for $235.

In their own way, Engelbreit and Rockwell are making their distinctive marks on home furnishings, and their signature looks are gaining in influence.

Engelbreit, who has retail stores bearing her name in a suburb of Atlanta, St. Louis, and most recently Chicago and Denver, plans to expand to 10 more cities by the end of 1995. Sales of her licensed merchandise were projected to reach $88 million last year, an increase of 76 percent over 1993.

The Rockwell collection, some 300 pieces from Stanley (furniture), Capel (rugs), Carole Fabrics (custom bed and window coverings), Palacek (wicker and accessories), Ridgeway (clocks) and Sedgefield by Adams (lighting), is sold in fine furniture and department stores all over the country.

Initial response has been enthusiastic, and Stanley executives feel that it's because of the "warm-hearted emotions" evoked by Rockwell's work. From the looks of it, decorating with heart also means big business.

Sources

Call the following numbers to find your closest dealers.

Mary Engelbreit collection:

-- Mary Engelbreit, 6900 Delmar Blvd., St. Louis, Mo. 63130; (314) 726-5646.

-- Fabrics through Daisy Kingdom Inc., Enchanted Woods Inc., 3720 N.W. Yeon St., Portland, Ore. 97210; (800) 288-6004.

-- Decor Home Fashions, 295 Fifth Ave., Suite 1616, New York, N.Y. 10016-7159; (212) 545-7600.

-- Gaetano America Inc., 1854 Belcroft St., P.O. Box 3245, South El Monte, Calif. 91733; (818) 442-2858.

Sources for the Norman Rockwell collection:

-- Seattle-area Bon Marche stores

-- Stanley Furniture Co. Inc. P.O. Box 30, Stanleytown, Va. 24168; (703) 627-2000.

-- Capel Inc., P.O. Box 826, Troy, N.C. 27371; (800) 425-7847.

-- Carole Fabrics, P.O. Box 1436, Augusta, Ga. (800) 227-6532.

-- Palacek, P.O. Box 225, Richmond, Calif. 94808-0225; (800) 274-7730.

-- Ridgeway Clocks, a division of Pulaski Furniture Corp., P.O. Box 1371, Pulaski, Va. 24301; (703) 980-8990.