Rob Forbes' ruthless vision

Glen Ellen, Calif. — ROB FORBES stands in his large dining room, a room best described by what isn't there. No table, no artwork, no window treatments, nothing to clutter the space or block the 180-degree view of his swimming pool or his rural property. Almost lost against a fluorescent-white wall is a midcentury rosewood desk designed by Osvaldo Borsani. A black floor lamp and a plywood chair are next to it.

"There's not a lot in here and I may keep it that way," says the founder of Design Within Reach, a company that innovated how America buys and decorates with modern design.

Forbes, 54, spends his workdays surrounded by classic pieces by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Isamu Noguchi and George Nelson, yet when he breaks away from his San Francisco headquarters and his Russian Hill flat to spend a dozen days a month at his house in the Sonoma wine country, he leaves most of it behind.

Curiously, Forbes is in business to furnish homes, but he seems in no hurry to finish his own. "I haven't figured it all out yet," explains the bachelor, who hasn't hired a decorator for the house he purchased two years ago. "This will be a nice additive process."

The scant pieces in his dining room and throughout his home reflect a fine-tuned consistency -- a passion for elegance, simplicity and purposefulness -- as well as a degree of privacy. While profiles of his city digs have played in magazines and newspapers, he relishes the seclusion of his country home.

IN the family room, music pours out of a pale yellow radio and turntable with a Swiss-cheese facade that was designed by Achille Castiglioni in the 1960s. It should come as no surprise that Forbes favors the music of the '50s and '60s: John Coltrane, Dave Brubeck and Gerry Mulligan. Nearby is an orange recliner by Borsani from the 1950s and a faded green Spanish Fase floor lamp, probably from the 1970s.

In the kitchen that opens to the dining and family room, Forbes is serving espresso in blue pedestal cups he found in Barcelona and joking that the images of reclining and prancing figures on the cups are "quasi erotic."

"The truth is that I really enjoy the search about as much as anything, finding unusual pieces, learning the stories behind them. They become the centerpieces in the house and I will fill in around them," Forbes says.