Santa Rosa’s Astro Hotel launches online design store

At this downtown Santa Rosa motel, there's no need to settle for pilfering a few fluffy bath towels and slipping them into your suitcase. Instead, you're welcome to drive off with the furniture. You might even throw in a lamp, a framed poster or a vase. In fact, you can walk out with virtually everything in the room without hearing police sirens. Just make sure you pay for it before you leave.

At the retro-cool Astro Motel, with its sleek 1960s Space Age vibe, almost everything is for sale, including some of the fixtures. Now, the Astro has added an online store, making it easier to incorporate that “Mad Men” look into your home.

Since its re-opening in 2017, the motel has made its furnishings and decor available for purchase. You can, for a price, make that poster or chair you've fallen in love with your own. The motel will simply replace the piece with some other cool item from its inventory.

The new online store, at theastro.shop, allows you to browse the motel's inventory of items, all selected by co-owner Eric Anderson at auction.

The site features treasures at every price point, from a Mobler Danish sofa table for $199 up to a $5,000 1950s Arredoluce brass ceiling fixture. Everything is vintage and cherry-picked by Anderson, an enthusiast of midcentury modern, at auctions across the country. Unlike online retailers such as Wayfair which have multiples of everything, the Astro's online store sells singular pieces, as other antique stores do. If you don't strike when something catches your fancy, it may not be there when you return.

Hotel chains for years have marketed to consumers their own brand of linens and other mass-produced home goods through their “hotel” lines. But Anderson said the Astro may be among the first to sell singular pieces purchased for, possibly even used in, a hotel or motel.

The collector's market has driven up the prices on pieces by some of the finer midcentury designers. But much of the older stuff remains within reach of average wage earners. In fact, some items from the period still in production today or which have been reintroduced can cost more than the same item vintage because of current high material and labor costs, Anderson said.

For the people

The original idea behind modern design was that it would be sophisticated, yet not just for the rich.

“It was designed for the people. It was very, very high-minded,” Anderson said of the design movement, which has been loosely defined as stretching from the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s, with the apex being the 1950s.

The maxim of the movement, “form follows function,” was coined by Louis Sullivan, a Chicago architect of the late 19th- and early-20th centuries credited with inventing the skyscraper and whose apprentices included the visionary Frank Lloyd Wright.

“It's not meant to be fancy,” Anderson said of midcentury modern design. “Everything today is luxury. And luxury, for me, is boring. It doesn't speak to me. They aren't mutually exclusive, but if we can design something beautifully that is affordable to the vast majority of people, that's perfect.

“That is what we wanted to do at the Astro. We wanted these well-designed rooms, each with authentic vintage 1963 furniture of the period, plus or minus five or 10 years.”

The Astro was built in 1963, during the middle of the Space Race, when a fascination with space travel pervaded everything from toys to home decor. It was part of a small chain of family-friendly motels. But time took its toll, and the little motor lodge was eventually abandoned by vacationers and taken over by drug addicts and prostitutes. It fell into seedy disrepair until its renovation and reopening in 2017.

Anderson, as designer, kept much of the same vibe for the motel's reopening, but added some contemporary features. One of the most radical changes was a decision to turn the parking lot into a landscaped courtyard and move the parking off-site.

Anderson was turned on to design when he was 15 and Santa Rosa physician and woodworker Scott Chilcott gave him a copy of “The Soul of a Tree” by George Nakashima. Nakashima was an architect, master woodworker, furniture maker and a pioneer in the 20th- century American crafts movement and “organic naturalism.”.

In graduate school in New York, Anderson approached one of his linguistic professors who was close friends with Nakashima. When the professor heard Anderson was interested in working with the master, he picked up the phone and called Nakashima.

“I did meet him and it reinforced an incredible sense of aesthetic that very much informs my feelings about how the Astro looks and feels,” Anderson said.

For the motel's rebirth, Anderson set about sourcing furnishings, decor and art at auctions across the country.

“There is a whole world of auctions out there. Which is a rabbit hole,” he said. “If you have the right kind of OCD, you can really dig down and explore.”

For Anderson, one of those rabbit holes was following the trail of the Danish Rya rug.

“They're super funky 1955 to 1975 plush shag carpets with fun designs. They're quite small - 3-by-5 (feet) and 4-by-6. They're fun to find and figure out.”

Where to look

Two of Anderson's top sources for vintage pieces are Bidsquare.com and Liveauctioneers.com. Both are clearing houses for hundreds of auctions all over the country. Buying directly at auction rather than retail can save you a lot of money, but you have to be wary, know how to judge quality and authenticity and have the patience to weed through auction listings to find what you're looking for.

“You may have to go through a lot to find something good,” Anderson said. Locally, he likes Clars Auction Gallery in Oakland and Michaan's Auctions in Alameda. There are also a few retailers in Sonoma County who specialize in vintage midcentury modern design. Janakos & Co. has a 4,000-square-foot warehouse and display gallery on River Road in Fulton dedicated to midcentury furnishings, lighting and more. In Sebastopol, Gregory Odle has Restrospect, specializing in midcentury design.

Currently, chrome and Formica are out and Danish teak is in, Odle said. Many of the great furniture designers of the period were also architects who had to work their way up the ladder making furniture before they could be entrusted with major building projects, he said.

Midcentury modern is particularly popular among millennials, now in their 30s. Many have decided the inexpensive furniture at IKEA is a waste of money. They recognize that many vintage pieces are more well-made, with higher-quality materials.

Anderson said he got his unique idea for selling his motel inventory from the The Candy Store Gallery in Folsom. When health inspectors shut down Adeliza McHugh's home-based candy-making business, she got together with artists and turned the space into an art gallery in 1962, around the same time the Astro launched in Santa Rosa.

“The idea of The Candy Store for me is the kernel for the idea of selling this art and this furniture in the hotel if people want to buy it,” he said.

Like any picker, Anderson enjoys the thrill of the hunt. Something as seemingly modest as a collection of California art history books can yield treasure, as Anderson has discovered. Once, at an auction, he scored a Matisse wall hanging for $700, though it's likely worth more than five times that.

He looks in particular for items he says, “capture the moment” when the Astro was in its heyday. One piece he loves, for sale on the website, is a photograph by Bob Davidoff mounted on artist canvas of John F. Kennedy and his family on Easter Sunday 1963. He also is excited about a 1961 picture of Muhammad Ali in boxing trunks hanging in one of the Astro's rooms. It's an emblematic image of the era, Anderson said.

Even so, he doesn't mind letting it go to someone else who would cherish it.

“I'd really love to sell that picture,” he said, “and put up some other fun stuff.”

You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com or 707-521-5204.