Design Within Reach

Design Within Reach was founded in 1999 by Rob Forbes with the premise that the canonical furniture designs of the twentieth century should be available to the consumer through legitimate licensed channels rather than through the unlicensed copies and knock-offs that had saturated the market for decades. The DWR model, which partners with the estates and licensing organizations that hold the rights to the designs of Charles and Ray Eames, Hans Wegner, Harry Bertoia, Eero Saarinen, and the other major figures of twentieth-century furniture design, provides consumers with authenticated versions of the chairs, tables, and sofas that appear in design history books.

The Eames lounge chair and ottoman, designed by Charles and Ray Eames in 1956 for Herman Miller, is the piece most closely associated with the DWR product line: the molded rosewood shell and the black leather upholstery in the original configuration, or the walnut shell with various leather colors in the contemporary licensed versions, produce the chair that has become the definitive symbol of the mid-century modern interior. The Georgetown customer who has grown up seeing the Eames chair in design magazines and who wants the actual authorized version rather than a copy will find it at the Georgetown M Street DWR.

The M Street location at 3338 is at the western end of Georgetown’s design district block, adjacent to BoConcept and near the other furniture showrooms that have established this section of M Street as the Georgetown furniture destination. The DWR showroom floor presents the mid-century modern furniture canon in the full-scale context that allows the Georgetown buyer to understand how the Saarinen tulip table or the Bertoia side chair occupies physical space.

Hours run from 10am most days and noon Sunday. The DWR authorization model, which requires the brand’s retail partners to carry only the licensed versions of the designs rather than the knock-offs that saturate the general furniture market, is what makes the DWR purchase different from the alternative sources. The collector who wants the actual Eames lounge chair rather than a copy, with the warranty and the provenance that the authorized retail relationship provides, will find it at Design Within Reach.

The Georgetown M Street showroom at 3338 is in the design district block where BoConcept, Calligaris, and the other furniture showrooms have established the M Street address as the Georgetown furniture destination. The M Street design context, in which the DWR customer can visit multiple showrooms in an afternoon, creates the comparison shopping environment that the serious furniture buyer uses. DWR is open seven days a week, with Monday through Saturday hours from 10am and Sunday hours from noon. The M Street address at 3338 is open seven days a week, from 10am Monday through Saturday and noon on Sunday, providing the Georgetown customer with the retail access to the twentieth-century design canon that the neighborhood’s design district makes possible. The DWR Georgetown showroom is a natural companion to the Italian and Scandinavian furniture showrooms in the same design district block.