Living vroom : Furniture Fantasies Come to Life in Revved-Up Designs Sparked by the Imagination

When John Wilson puts you in the driver’s seat, you can push the pedal to the metal, crank up the tunes and cruise--all without leaving the comfort of your home.

The Dana Point designer-craftsman specializes in bringing furniture fantasies to life.

Take his signature ’57 Chevy chair, for instance.

The bumpers, the grille and other outer markings are vacuum-formed plastic, which is lightweight but gives the illusion of heavy metal. The plastic is the same as that used by Mattel for its model cars.

The upholstery is authentic, much of it the same materials used in the original cars, but overstuffed for comfort.

“My affinity or love affair for cars is what motivated me to design the ’57 Chevy chair,” said Wilson, 46, who took three years to perfect the design, which he hopes to have produced by a furniture manufacturer soon.

While car furniture is currently the center of his attention, his interests do not stop there. He has turned a number of rooms on their ears, created sets for television shows and helped design real-life things--such as prototype cars for Chrysler and Disney’s Splash Mountain in Tokyo.

He combines his expertise in design, upholstery and soft sculpture to bring his or a client’s fantasies into the three-dimensional world. Have you ever wanted to walk on clouds--the puffy, fluffy ones that resemble cotton balls? He can pluck them out of the sky and turn them into a chair.

You may have seen his jungle scene couch with trees attached. It was his first showing at the Laguna Beach Festival of Arts, which is where the comedy television series “Silver Spoon” saw it. The show leased the couch for its set, giving weekly national exposure to his work. Other TV shows bought Wilson’s pieces, too, including car props for the opening scenes on “My 2 Dads” and an oversize hamburger-and-French-fry chair showcased on “The Price Is Right.”

Wilson recently designed and built an elaborate playhouse for the children of a client in Beverly Hills. For this project, which he completed about four months ago for about $250,000, Wilson really let his imagination run wild.

Next to the house, he constructed a larger-than-life, two-level concrete tree with nine massive limbs. It is connected to the outside of the house and gives access to an attic playroom. One of the limbs is used for a swing; a slide from the second level is positioned between two other limbs. There is a door into the tree on the first level that leads to the playroom stairs.

The tree is landscaped with a waterfall and a garden, along with three-dimensional fabric pumpkins, a mailbox and fireflies that light up at night as a special effect. Wilson fashioned 500 vacuum-formed leaves (detailed down to the veins) on the structure, giving it a realistic, but cartoonish, tone.

He carried this fanciful mood inside the playroom, which has 12-foot-tall Dutch doors and a big window to the outdoors. The room is divided into vignettes, including a jungle, a beach and undersea area and a train room with switcher.

“It’s all padded and very colorful,” Wilson said. “There are 30 fish and kelp I hung from the ceiling by fishing line. For the ocean and beach, I used different colored carpets with seashell cutouts.

“In the jungle room, I used bamboo all around and animal chairs with faces that have a cartoony feel. All of the animal faces are made from latex in a soft-sculpture style, but bigger than scale. . . . In the train room, the hat rack is also the switcher.”

Wilson hired several people to help with the project, including longtime high school pal Terry Robideau of Burbank. Robideau, who has helped Wilson with a number of his creations, was in on the initial brainstorming for the tree/playroom.

“One of the jewels of our relationship is the brainstorming,” Robideau said. Wilson “basically creates fantasy environments. He can nearly re-create the wheel; that’s his nature.

“If you give the guy something to go on, the wheels immediately start turning.”

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For Wilson, wheels are where it all started.

He attended L.A. Trade Tech in 1972, specializing in automobile upholstery. At the time he was restoring an old MG but had problems with the seats, so he took the class to learn the basics. With that knowledge, Wilson flourished.

“I’d restore cars or trucks, then at some point along the way, I started getting tired of upholstering,” he said. “I’d been doing it for eight, nine, 10 years.

“It wasn’t creative enough. So I got into doing off-road racing seats. I would take a normal job that I could probably whip through, and I would always complicate it by making it jazzier, building the seats up, doing something fancy.”

After spending a year at the Art Center of Design in Pasadena in 1986, he worked as an independent contractor for Disney. He learned a lot there, he says, “because at Disney, you’re really scrutinized. They’re very particular; everything you do has to be right on the money.”

A rewarding experience, but it wasn’t automobile design, which Wilson thought would be his forte. He took a job at Metal Crafters in Costa Mesa.

“They do all of Chrysler’s prototype cars; they built the Stealth, the Viper, all their concept cars,” Wilson said. “It was unbelievable. We built everything but the drive train (the engine, transmission and rear) from scratch--the rims, the glass, the frames for the seats. And they’re very particular.

“The first thing I worked on was an interior for a van, and they sent six guys out to inspect the thing. They wanted to be sure every stitch was absolutely, perfectly straight.

“What that experience did was take my skills and honed them. It’s funny, but I feel it all has come together now. It was really a challenge, but I learned a lot.”

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All along the way, Wilson began gradually creating the soft-sculpture furniture that now occupies his imagination.

He has combined his knowledge of upholstery, design and cars to create car furniture. In addition to the ’57 Chevy, there is a Porsche sofa, a Woody bed and chairs that look like a Ferrari and a ’37 Cord.

Wilson said it wasn’t easy squeezing the look of a car into the shape of a chair or sofa.

“I wanted to capture the front end and the rear end of the car, because both have interesting aspects and elements, yet somehow work the chair thing in there, too,” he said. “My early pieces, like the Porsche (couch), I approached it from the side, because the lines lend themselves to it, but every time . . . it just didn’t look right.

“Finally, one day out of frustration, I threw those designs away and I thought, OK, looking at the front end of the car, why not just take the hood, lift it up and push it back, keeping the profile. Then I took the front and back and squashed it, and there was the chair.”

His work ended up steering Wilson in several new directions, such as the tree playhouse and, most recently, the job of helping design a family recreation center William Scott Golf planned in Irvine. It will include a 36-hole miniature golf course, bumper boat area, Go Karts, batting cage, video arcade and an interactive play area for kids.

After that, who knows which way Wilson will go.

“I have a vivid imagination,” he says, “so the sky’s the limit.”