By listModern
Modern design does not sustain itself through architects alone. It also depends on the people and places that connect architects, designers, manufacturers, clients, and ideas, translating an international design culture into the rooms where people actually live and work.
In Washington, M2L has occupied that role for decades.
GENUINE DESIGN
Michael Manes founded M2L more than 30 years ago with a clear focus on modern furniture and what the company calls “Genuine Design.” Today, his son Matt Manes serves as president, continuing a family business built around an idea that seems simple but has increasingly important implications: the design should come from the designer, and the object should be manufactured with the authorization, standards, and intent of its creator or estate.
M2L has made that distinction between authentic design and imitation central to its identity.
That philosophy makes M2L something different from a conventional furniture retailer. Its collection brings together important historical designs and contemporary work, and its business is built largely on relationships with architects and interior designers.
Product drawings, CAD files, project boards, specification resources and deep manufacturer knowledge are part of the service. The furniture may be what ultimately arrives in the room, but much of M2L’s work happens earlier, as part of the design process itself.
A WASHINGTON DESIGN PRESENCE
Washington has long been important to that story.
Before Georgetown, M2L operated from the Washington Design Center. In the mid 2000s, the company moved into Cady’s Alley and commissioned Washington architect Robert M. Gurney, FAIA, to design a new showroom there.
Rather than mimic the dark, industrial character of the surrounding canal warehouses, Gurney created a restrained interior of white terrazzo, white oak, aluminum, and dark wood, allowing the furniture and objects to become the primary visual elements. The project received the AIA|DC Award of Excellence in Interior Architecture in 2007.
It was an unusually appropriate collaboration. Gurney is one of Washington’s most important modern residential architects, and the showroom treated furniture and architecture as parts of the same idea. Walls, planes, circulation, materials and objects were considered together rather than independently.
M2L’s current Washington gallery remains in Georgetown, continuing a presence in the neighborhood’s design community that now spans two decades.
THE PEOPLE BEHIND THE SHOWROOM
The history of a showroom is not only the history of its founder, its brands or its address. It is also the people who become its face.
For more than a decade, Narcisse Garzan and Heather Cumings have been central to M2L’s presence in Washington. They are familiar figures to many of the region’s architects, interior designers and design clients, and that continuity matters.
Garzan manages M2L’s Washington operation and works across commercial and residential trade relationships, while Cumings has focused extensively on the residential interior design community. Their value is difficult to reduce to a job title. It is accumulated product knowledge, sourcing knowledge, and, perhaps most importantly, relationships.
That familiarity helps turn a showroom into a resource.
An architect or designer is not simply walking in to choose a chair. They may be trying to understand a manufacturer’s capabilities, resolve a material, find an appropriate piece for an unusual room, replace something no longer readily available or determine whether a design imagined in Europe can actually work within a project in Washington.
Over years of those conversations, the showroom becomes part of the local design community's infrastructure.
AUTHORSHIP AND STEWARDSHIP
M2L’s commitment to authorship is also visible in its stewardship of historical work.
The company is the sole licensee to manufacture and distribute the designs of American furniture designer Harvey Probber, working with the Probber family to return important pieces to production after a roughly 30-year absence from the marketplace.
That effort points to a larger idea.
Modernism is sometimes presented as an aesthetic, a collection of recognizable shapes, materials and objects. At its best, it is much more rigorous than that. Authorship matters. Manufacturing matters. Materials matter. Provenance matters. The relationships among architecture, interiors and objects matter.
Washington is better known internationally for monuments, institutions and civic architecture than for its residential design culture. Yet behind that public identity is a remarkably interconnected community of architects, interior designers, builders, craftspeople, photographers, showrooms and clients who have supported serious modern work here for decades.
M2L belongs to that history. It has brought international design into Washington, supported generations of local design professionals, preserved important work and created a place where architects and designers can encounter furniture as design rather than merchandise.
The distinction is subtle, but important. M2L sells extraordinary objects. Its greater contribution has been sustaining the culture around them.
