Jenna Lyons in her Soho loft with a lamp, tables, and dining chair from her new furniture collection with Roll & Hill.
“I love playing with materials,” says Jenna Lyons, the New York-based fashion designer, style icon, and television personality. As the longtime creative force behind J.Crew, she made her name putting quirky-cool twists on preppy classics, layering chunky necklaces and sweatshirts with oversized blazers and pairing denim button-downs with, well, basically anything—even eveningwear. On our recent Zoom call, she wore a classic striped oxford and a navy trucker hat emblazoned with the Roll & Hill logo, a clue to her latest project: a debut collection of furniture with the hit Brooklyn brand.
After decorating her own trendsetting homes—the Park Slope brownstone, the SoHo loft—and overseeing the visual identity for countless stores, furniture was a natural pivot. “Design, for me, has always been about solving a problem,” she explains, posing the question “What do I want?” Her new line reflects the running list she’s been keeping over the years. A table lamp combines a mushroom-like glass shade with a hard-to-find brass base. (Most, she attests, are chrome.) Her spin on the Louis XIV dining chair is comfy yet dainty, with a gracious scale, leather upholstery, and thin-but-not-scrawny legs. Meanwhile, a wood cocktail table and nightstand (they’re available in oak or walnut) deliver elements of surprise: Discreet shelves of unlacquered brass swing out from under the table, offering places to set a drink. “Like earrings,” she remarks of the subtle bling.
Available now, all the furniture pieces are produced in Grand Rapids, Michigan, at the sprawling 40,000-square-foot factory Roll & Hill purchased in February 2020. (Best known for lighting with the likes of Lindsey Adelman, Ladies & Gentlemen Studio, and Philippe Malouin, the company officially expanded into furniture this past spring.) Not unlike Lyons’s fashions, Roll & Hill founder Jason Miller notes, the furnishings “are very traditional forms, but they feel pretty contemporary.” Lyons, who enrolled in a woodworking class to prepare for the collaboration, likens the process to updating a classic jean jacket. “I’m not going to reinvent the table,” she says. “Instead, it’s about asking, what should that look like today?” rollandhill.com