Brad Pitt turns master furniture designer – with discomfiting results

Brad Pitt is no stranger to the world of architecture. He has collaborated with Frank Gehry to build homes in New Orleans, dropped by the offices of Rem Koolhaas in Rotterdam, and has said he is "pushing his kids" to become architects. But now he has turned his hand to furniture design.

His first collection, which will be officially unveiled in New York next week, is a collaboration with furniture maker Frank Pollaro, whose New Jersey firm mainly produces slick art deco reproductions.

Comprising a number of tables and chairs, a double bath and a vast ocean liner of a bed, the pieces are a strange mishmash of Pitt's eclectic influences, which he says span everything from Arts and Crafts to Bauhaus and Tiffany lamps.

"I've been doodling ideas for buildings and furniture since the early 1990s, when I first discovered Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Frank Lloyd Wright," he told Architectural Digest. "Actually, I found Wright in college, when looking for a lazy two-point credit to get out of French. It forever changed my life."

These strange fantasies would have remained doodles – if only Pollaro had not happened upon Pitt's sketchbook one fateful day when he visited his house to install a desk. Spotting a winning PR opportunity, he didn't hesitate. "I asked him: 'Why don't we make some of this stuff real?'"

The results are an ungainly fusion of Pollaro's polished deco sensibilities with injections of Pitt's doodles, all finished in a luxurious palette that recalls a hotel lobby. Produced as limited editions, they will be sold "at the highest end of the custom-furnishings scale … even north of that."

The bed is the most overwrought design of all, with a swooping tropical hardwood frame, a mattress supported by nickel trusses, and tray tables on either side with silk-under-glass tops.

A recurring theme in Pitt's table designs is the substitution of conventional legs for one continuous line of structure, a single strip that undulates, bends and folds in a contorted 3D doodle.

"It started with my introduction to Mackintosh's Glasgow rose, which is drawn with one continuous line," says Pitt. "But for me there is something more grand at play, as if you could tell the story of one's life with a single line."

The line has been a preoccupation for some time. In 2003 he told USA Weekend: "There is that thing I love of an individual in a room finding a line – and by 'line' I mean an angle, something that interests them – and following it and seeing where it goes."

Next time, Brad, maybe it's best not to find out.

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