Four careers, one thread
From the stage to the runway to the airwaves to Greene Street.
Both men began as actors — a fact that explains nearly everything about MOSS. The store was theater twice daily. This timeline follows their parallel and entwined careers.
The joint chronology
Origins
Murray Moss is born in Chicago (raised in Lincolnwood, Illinois). Franklin Getchell grows up on a farm — a fact he later deploys to explain why he doesn't garden. Both will train as actors: Murray at Columbia and NYU's School of the Arts, Franklin at Harvard and the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art.
Sources: Wikipedia · Moss Bureau bios
The acting years
Murray works professionally as an actor in the United States and Great Britain. Franklin tours in musical theatre, does episodic police dramas in Hollywood, and logs ten years on stage and television. The theatrical instinct never leaves either man.
Sources: Moss Bureau · The Grand Tourist
Shamask
Murray, with Dutch designer Ronaldus Shamask, launches the fashion label Shamask — clothing praised for architectural, structural qualities. It expands into full women's and men's collections with international distribution. Franklin, meanwhile, becomes an advertising copywriter and then a television writer and producer.
Source: Wikipedia
Television years
Franklin produces over 800 hours of programming across PBS, NBC, CBS, ABC and HBO, works in the UK, France, Malaysia and Japan, creates a UK cable channel, and spends six years running Sesame Street at Children's Television Workshop. An Emmy, a Peabody, a Christopher, the Japan Prize, seven Emmy nominations.
Source: Moss Bureau bio
Exit from fashion
The Shamask trademarks and trade names are sold. Murray has spent a decade learning how objects are made, merchandised, and mythologized. He is about to apply all of it elsewhere.
Source: Wikipedia
MOSS opens · 146 Greene Street, SoHo
A modest storefront designed by Harry Allen, staged like a museum vitrine: Ettore Sottsass vases, Joe Colombo ashtrays, soaps shaped like the Venus of Willendorf — arranged in arches behind glass, each piece wrapped like a diamond from Tiffany. The store changes its presentation almost daily. "Little gorgeous things," elevated to fine art.
Sources: Architectural Digest · Wikipedia
Franklin joins; MOSS doubles
Getchell joins full-time as life and business partner, becoming President. They annex two floors of the adjacent former Metro Pictures gallery — room for furniture, larger exhibitions, bigger ambition. Murray receives House Beautiful's Giants of Design Award.
Sources: Wikipedia · Moss Bureau
"Where There's Smoke…" — Maarten Baas
After meeting the 25-year-old Baas in Paris, MOSS commissions and stages his burnt-furniture Smoke series as a solo show during ICFF — budget forwarded immediately, twenty-five pieces, no backup plan. It becomes one of the gallery's defining exhibitions and launches Baas's career. Baas later calls it not a stepping stone but "a space shuttle launch platform."
Moss Gallery
Expansion into a new corner building beside the two shops: a "theater-like" venue for special exhibitions, with a focal wall of pieced wood by the Campana brothers. The press superlatives pile up: "arguably the best design store in America" (NYT), "the best design store in the world" (IHT, Alice Rawsthorn).
Sources: Wikipedia · AD · Moss Bureau press page
Design Miami/, disruptively
Rejected by the first fair's Gallery Committee as too disruptive, they're given a 15,000 sq ft ground floor nearby by Craig Robins instead — and become, in their words, wildly, correctly disruptive: everybody migrates from the fair to MOSS. Philippe Starck signs gun lamps in the shop that year.
Source: Design Miami/ interview
Empire mode
Centovini, the Italian restaurant and wine shop with Nicola Marzovilla (2006 — later wins Travel + Leisure's Best New Restaurant Design); MOSS Los Angeles on Melrose Avenue (2006); a MOSS shop in Philippe Starck's SLS Hotel at Beverly Hills (2008). Studio Job's Homework: Pinocchio is created for MOSS in 2007; Maarten Baas's Baby Grande Flambe opens MOSS LA.
Sources: Wikipedia · Design Miami/
Recognition
Chrysler Design Award and Russel Wright Award (2002), Metropolitan Home Modernism Award (2004), Interior Design Hall of Fame (2007), Art + Auction "Most Powerful People in the Art World" (2011). Boards: Cooper-Hewitt, DIFFA. Lectures everywhere: TED, Harvard GSD, Yale, the Smithsonian, the V&A.
Sources: Wikipedia · Moss Bureau
Closing bell
After the recession, all MOSS shops and galleries close. Washington Post had said it in 2003: once in a hundred years. Metropolis eulogizes Murray as the retailer most responsible for taking high-end design mainstream. At that juncture, Moss Bureau is founded — a consultancy "intervening" in museum-retail operations, with curatorial advisory work.
Sources: Wikipedia · Moss Bureau
Author
Murray publishes three books: Tertium Quid (August Editions, 2013), Baccarat: Two Hundred and Fifty Years (Rizzoli, 2013), Georg Jensen Reflections (Rizzoli, 2014).
Source: Moss Bureau
Moving to America
After 46 years together in Manhattan — the last 12 in Olympic Tower — Murray and Franklin cross the state line to Hamden, Connecticut, buying a red 1929 Colonial Revival cottage by forgotten architect Alice Washburn. They name it Torpedo House. They discover neighbors, grocery stores ("forty-six aisles"), and that their stove was never hooked up anywhere they'd ever lived.
Sources: 1stDibs Introspective · Upstate Diary
Please Do Not Touch
Rizzoli publishes their freewheeling tell-all memoir-compendium of the store's rise and fall, co-authored with editor Dung Ngo. The title is the store's signature admonition — itself a Mossian ploy to stoke desire. That year they also leave Manhattan again for the Connecticut coast full-time.
Sources: Architectural Digest
Torpedo House & the long tail
Torpedo House operates as a "house-gallery" by appointment — prices on nearly everything, nothing touchable, obviously. Murray wakes at 4am and re-curates the house daily, dragging objects around on towels; RISD buses students in to study it. Their vintage press-photo collection becomes a project in its own right. In 2022 Design Miami/ launches Design Miami/ x MOSS, selling pieces from their private collection. Murray speaks openly about living with Parkinson's; the wit reportedly undulled.
Sources: Upstate Diary · Design Miami/ · The Grand Tourist