In Studio With Double Butter

DoubleButter has carved out a distinctive niche in Denver's design scene with its blend of irreverent wit, hands-on craftsmanship, and a steadfast commitment to local production. Founded in 2006 by David Larabee and Dexter Thornton, the studio is renowned for its clean-lined, durable furniture that seamlessly marries industrial materials with playful design elements. Operating from their Baker neighborhood workshop—complete with chickens and bees—the duo has cultivated a creative environment that reflects their design ethos. Their work has garnered attention not only from design enthusiasts but also from institutions like the Denver Art Museum, which houses several of their pieces in its permanent collection. In this conversation, Larabee and Thornton delve into their unconventional journey into furniture design, the evolution of their collaborative practice, and the philosophies that continue to guide their work.

FF: Can you tell us about your backgrounds—where you’re from, and what led each of you to design and fabrication?

DL: I’m from upstate New York—a small town outside Albany—and I moved out here after college with a friend in a VW camper van. At the time I was planning on law school and I actually made it as far as orientation week before realizing, Bluth-style, that I'd made a huge mistake. Civil Procedure made me very sleepy; making furniture, which I’d done a bit of in a friend’s shop after graduating, did not. I figured I’d get a job to save enough money to buy some equipment and give it a go. After 5 or so years in tech I quit and set up shop in a rented garage near Cheesman, took a year or so to design and build an initial line and set up a website to try to hawk it.

DT: I'm from Denver but did a college stint north of Chicago miming as a liberal arts student all the while method acting as a Custodial Engineer. Facilities management is such an immersive role that I altered my trajectory and ended up with a furniture design degree from Pratt: Bona-fucking-fide.

FF: How did the two of you meet, and what sparked the idea to start DoubleButter together?

DL: We’ve answered the "How'd you two meet?" question a bunch of different ways over the years—we met at Chatfield Reservoir flying RC planes; we met on a dance floor at Berghain; we met driving the USPS mule train hauling mail into the Grand Canyon. Maybe one of those is true, maybe all of them are true. But DoubleButter officially started in Denver at P Design Gallery in 2006. We were both making furniture independently with our own small companies at that point and both thought that having another guy around to help carry the really heavy stuff would be better. P Design was new—started by Paul and Pifuka Hardt a year or so prior—and we were offered a show, paired for some inexplicable reason with Tord Boontje, the Dutch industrial designer. We've stuck around since; P Design is long gone.

FF: Where did the name DoubleButter come from? There’s a sense of humor and character in it—was that intentional from the start?

DL: The whole point of the enterprise from the start was to have fun doing work we love. It’s just furniture—it’s not that serious. The work is very tight and precise and, we think, quite beautiful and timeless. But all that comes out of a looseness and a collaborative, improvisational mindset. The name reflects all of that—just an offhand comment...

Dexter made about mixing peanut butter and regular butter. It was and is silly. But it’s a good metaphor for collaboration and DoubleButter really is better.

FF: Looking back at your early days, was there a particular piece or project that made you feel, ‘We’re really onto something here’?

DL: For me it was the Shoefiti project you asked about—the little Roadrunner chair profiles tied together and thrown over wires around Denver and much farther afield. Marketing is a problem, especially for small creative companies. It can feel disconnected from the actual work at the heart of the enterprise and at times it can actually undermine that work. Selling yourself can be completely disingenuous and the story you tell about the company and the work and yourself can be in active conflict with reality in a way that kills a bit of the spirit that animates the whole enterprise. But not with the Roadrunner shoefiti. Those little rubbery chair profiles were us to the core—fun to make, fun to throw, fun to get our far-flung friends involved in, fun to write about and photograph, fun to mythologize. And people noticed in a way that generated interest in the things we were selling.

FF: You’ve built a reputation for designing and manufacturing locally, long before it became a broader movement. How has that commitment shaped your work over the years?

DL: There are countless ways—more every day—to physically make objects and understanding the production process and materials you’re going to use of course hugely informs the design. Starting with the tools we owned ourselves we designed around what we could make efficiently and well with those tools and our sensibilities. But Denver’s got a bunch of small industrial shops with equipment we don’t have and can’t justify owning given our scale. So we've gotten to know a few, personally and professionally, what machinery they have and what they can reliably and repeatably do: water-jet shops and press brake shops for cutting and forming sheet metal, CNC shops (when owning a CNC was more rare than today) for cutting wood panels and parts, a milling shop for machining the brass and aluminum elements in a (shelved, for now) new line of products. Being close to them lets us keep our costs and production lead times down and it keeps us connected, intimately, to the process and products.

FF: Your studio environment—complete with chickens and bees—feels like an extension of your design philosophy. How does that setting influence your creativity?

DL: It’s a cliché but, man, do bees keep busy! There are a million things to do—flowers to visit, honeycomb to build, bee bread to bake—and they keep after it, day after day after day. It’s hard to slack when that’s your model. Plus, there’s the occasional swarm to keep things lively. And the chickens keep at it too, though what they keep at—namely the scratching and pecking and random clucking and dust-bathing and staring dumbly into the middle distance—isn’t as inspirational. But they show up for work every day in the same lovely garden as we do, along with the bees, and for sure their work is an extension of their nature, as ours is for us, even if they are complete and total idiots.

FF: What does collaboration look like between the two of you, especially after so many years in business together?

DL: Sadly, it mostly looks like scratching, pecking, random clucking, dust-bathing and staring dumbly into the middle distance. We hoped we were bees but we may just be chickens.

FF: If you weren’t designing furniture, what else could you see yourselves doing—either together or separately?

DT: I actually grew up in Baker—enticingly close to the Metropolitan Denver Local Development Corporation flagship. These MDLDC guys, lovingly nicknamed The Club Car Crew, spearheaded not only an inspiring upkeep system for Broadway but additionally spearheaded a whole generation of Baker young'uns' intrigue via their custom ClubCars—golf carts built to address the remnants from Travelers of the Night while also tackling design issues like un-puzzling disturbed pavers, leafblowing and sweeping the morning sunrise into the Broadway-commuters attitudes, refitting shade trees with new steel skirts—all the public conservatorship that a young blossoming mind can rake in. So maybe if we weren’t DoubleButtering we'd be Facilities Managing, FacManning, on Broadway.

FF: Is it true that you have a chair that you designed that’s part of the Denver Art Museum’s permanent collection? If so, what chair and how did that come to be?

DT: Bong bong, we actually have 3 pieces in DAM's Alamo-basement (stated in a snooty cluck). Joking aside, it's so awesome: DAM acquired our Roadrunner Chair in 2010 and a few years later they grabbed-ass on our Chairy Khalenian as well as its respective prototype. And the proverbial cherry atop—DAM has, arguably, one of FacMan's great effigies positioned at its entrance: Big Sweep, a 40 foot tall broom and dustpan by Claes Oldenburg. Holy jambroli, it's an indescribable honor to share space with such amazing company—and just off Broadway, I'd add. Yes, barely out of MDLDC's jurisdiction, but their ClubCars can certainly buzz over when called on if only to use Pledge™ and recite allegiance.

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Photos by Luke Gottlieb of Victor of Valencia