by Bob Waite
Walking into Black-Eyed Susan Style retail store I expect to see a nice furniture store with a very Bucks County traditional look. I am immediately taken off guard. This is so far beyond merely nice, that it is hard to describe. But in Susan Taylor’s 10,000 square-foot retail store I begin to see the craft of interior design taken to the highest level. Rooms were laid out with not only beautiful furniture, but with an attention to detail that included every accessory and even the positioning of the furniture. The building itself, Susan Taylor explains, was a general store and even for a while an apartment building. Located at 5222 York Road in Holicong, just outside of Doylestown, it is central to all of Bucks County.
The first thing I notice in the store are the colors. There are lots of white, gray, beige and what would be considered fairly neutral colors. There is a reason for that. Susan says, “In our customer’s home we can add the teal colored leather chair or the hot pink velvet chairs if that’s what they want. But in the store it not something that will translate to anyone’s house. So, we will add pops of color. We have found that gray is the new neutral and has been that way for ten years and it’s not going anywhere. Gray, creams, whites and very stylish and popular right now”
Any of the sofas or chairs can actually be bought with any color needed for a customer’s preference. In fact, Susan says that the store manager, John Gibbs can show customers hundreds of fabrics that can be on any particular piece of furniture. Pointing to an area where there are 100s, if not thousands of fabric samples, she says, “All the fabric you have here are for furniture. We carry special fabrics for each vendor and we carry a full line for pillows, drapery and anything we want that isn’t offered by that vendor, we can find in our books.”
Susan explains that the color of the fabric isn’t the only consideration. “What is popular right now are performance fabrics, which are fabrics that water and wine, when spilled, just bead and fall off. Our vendors make it so we can use very light fabrics and every year they come up with a larger selection and much finer offerings in performance fabrics. We design a lot of rooms around pets—even more so than children. There are issues with pets that we are constantly dealing with, performance fabrics are made for the family that actively lives with a pet, which most of young families do.”
Black-Eyed Susan’s location was in Yardley for 18 years but for the last 7 they have been in Holicong. Over the last 10 years, styles have changed and the traditional Bucks County look has been effected by the changes. Customers who come to the newer store are surprised by the changes in style. Susan says, “My Yardley customers our still having a little bit of a hard time getting used to seeing this more streamlined modern look, but when you are in the industry and you go to all the trades shows and you want to stay current and you want to be the leader in style, then you follow the trends.”
I notice that what I see in the store reflects much of what I see in the beautiful farmhouses we feature in Bucks County Magazine. These styles seem to tilt toward contemporary or modern. So I ask Susan bluntly, “What’s your look?”
She replies, “I would say its eclectic but there is a term that has been coined by one of our leading manufactures, and that term is ‘Neo-traditional.’ This is a good explanation for what is happening right now in furnishings. This has been a trend that has been building for the last seven years, and you cannot deny it anymore. There is very little old world, heavily carved, ornate heavy dark wood happening in interiors right now. It’s all cleaner. I like the term Neo-traditional.”
Susan Taylor’s primary business is interior design. She graduated with a degree in art from Brigham Young University. “What I found out in school is that I didn’t love drawing or sketching, but instead I loved when I could put together a color story or an inspirational board, and I found that I was good at it. So I decided that this is what I want to do, I don’t want to be an artist in the traditional sense. I want to work in designing and making things look beautiful.”
She remembers how she grew up in an environment that valued style. “I always give credit to my mother for any love I have for design. She was a stylish woman who always had the cutting edge going on in my home. She was not trained as designer but was well versed in all beautiful things”
After graduating from Brigham Young University, Susan got a job as a merchandising director for the May Company, department stores that were under the umbrella of Macy’s West Coast. “I had five stores that I was in charge of and I traveled to those stores and directed all their merchandising. I included the windows, the mannequins, the soft goods, the kitchen area—the entire store. I directed the look of all those five stores.”
After Susan worked for Macy’s West Coast a few years, she and her husband Brett made a few moves that included a move to Denver and a move to Pittsburg. During this period Susan took on some design projects. In 1984 she and Brett moved to this area and soon opened her first retail store. “I think it was a few years after we moved to the Philadelphia area is when I opened my first retail store and it was a little tiny cottage, maybe 500 square feet, in Lower Makefield. It was a very cute store that I called Black Eyed Susan. I named it that in the beginning, because we sold a lot of unusual florals and I created them all. I also wanted it to have my name in it and I wanted something that could transfer to any kind of business.”
In a little while, Black Eyed Susan moved to Yardley. “We had three buildings. I had my design offices, the corner building and then another building next store called Black Eyed Susan Cottage. It was all the floral cottage feel. That was such a trend at that time. It’s not as much now, but there is still a place for it. Cottage is reclaimed materials, rustic, white, slipcovered, soft, like a cottage. We used for shore houses and it Bucks County.”
In Yardley Black-Eyed Susan was designing with mainly a traditional look. “We had almost a Ralph Lauren feel—a chic old farm homes and manor house look. We still make room for photos and collections but we bring those elements in differently than before. In fact, I recently built a new home in Charlotte and it was hard for me to give up some of my collections that I have had for years and years of dishes, silver, vintages books. I didn’t have many places for them. That was a large part of our look for many years.”
Now settled into a more modern or neo-traditional look, Susan often amazes her Yardley clients when they come to visit. “When clients we had in Yardley come into our store, they say, ‘Wow your look has changed!’ I still have clients that come in from Yardley and ask me when the old Black Eyed Susan coming back, and I say, probably not before I retire.”
Susan often eases her clients from the Yardley days into a more current look. “I can still do things for them, and much of our work is redesigning some of the original homes that we did when I first opened. We show them how they can keep their favorite things, and at the same time, bring it into the current style. We say, ‘This is what the look is now, and this is how we are going to translate your home more into that look.’”
Black-Eyed Susan has no limit to what they design. Susan says, “We do all the furnishing, from the rugs, the drapery, the accents, furniture everything and then do the entire installation too. And yes, we also do kitchens. We do mostly the consulting, but we have preferred vendors and dealers that we will bring in, and we will connect customers to the contractor and kitchen designer we like most. We will do all the consulting for the finishes, styles, counter tops, wall colors everything for kitchen and bath.”
The first decision for a customer and designer when they begin is color. “When we get to the presentation stage, we have a really nice spot in the new design studio where we show them three to five pallets of color. We will have it all laid out to see that this will be wall color, wallpaper, sofa and chair fabrics, but we start with the palette first. The palette comes first and sometimes we are forced to pick out a basic pallet so that a painter can go in and paint the entire house.”
After that comes furnishing. “The next step would be the furniture pieces, showing them the style, the sofa frame this fabric is going to go on. But by then we know their style. And for accents, we use lamps, rugs pillows, accessories and maybe a chair or two in a bolder pattern.”
Because of Black-eyed Susan’s national reputation, they have clients in diverse areas, such as Manhattan, Salt Lake City, Charleston and anywhere they are needed. Susan’s husband Brett, retired from a career in the pharmaceutical industry does many of these long-distance installations, hangs art and even drives the truck for both local and distant installations. He doesn’t deliver the furniture anymore because they have a company that does that, but he is hands on and everyone on the staff loves him.
For Susan Taylor design is important and when done well, it lasts. “We like to design something that’s timeless enough that the expiration date is already out there. I think I have said one time to someone, not long ago, that we like to design so that the expiration date doesn’t look looming. Its clean and practical enough so it can withstand the test of time.”
Blacked Eyed Susan Style is located at 5222 York Road, Holicong, PA 18929. For information about a design consultation or the retail store, call 215-794-1800 visit www.besusan.com.