HOLLYWOOD — Gideon Pilcher, who for fifty-three years rented out the furniture, lamps, telephones, ashtrays and dinner services of a century of American interiors from a warehouse off Cahuenga Boulevard, died August 1 at a hospital in Burbank. He was 94.
His daughter Verity Pilcher-Nakamura said the cause was a stroke.
The warehouse, which his father opened in 1947 and which Mr. Pilcher ran from 1961 until he sold it in 2014, held at its peak something over 90,000 items across three floors and a mezzanine reached by a freight elevator that required a specific technique. Set decorators came to it for the thing they could not describe. This was, by universal account, the business’s actual product — not the objects but Mr. Pilcher’s ability to identify which object a person meant.
“You would say, ‘I need a phone for a 1963 dentist’s waiting room in a mid-size city,’” said Nadine Alcott, a set decorator who worked with him for thirty years. “Most houses would walk you to the phones. There were four hundred phones. Gideon would walk you to one phone. And it was the phone.”
He kept no computerized inventory until 1998 and never fully trusted the one he then installed, on the grounds that a database can tell you where an object is but not what it is for. What he kept instead was a memory that colleagues describe in terms usually reserved for a physical archive: not only the location of items but their history — which production had used a particular sideboard, what had been done to it, which of its four drawers no longer opened, and which decorator had a standing objection to it.
Corwin Ardmore, who bought the business in 2014 and who put much of its contents up for auction last month, said he spent his first two years as owner phoning Mr. Pilcher perhaps twice a week.
“I had the building and the stock and the leases and I did not have the catalog, because the catalog was a person,” Mr. Ardmore said. “He was extraordinarily gracious about it. He never once said ‘it’s in the system.’ He knew it wasn’t.”
The auction, which this paper covered in July, dispersed roughly 11,000 lots. Mr. Pilcher did not attend. His daughter said he was invited, considered it for several days, and decided against it in a sentence she has repeated a number of times since: “It is not a funeral and I will not make it one.”
He did, however, buy something. Through a bidder acting on his behalf he acquired lot 4,412 — a brass-and-Bakelite desk lamp of no particular value that had been in the warehouse since 1951 and had appeared, by his own count, in 214 productions. It is now on a table in his daughter’s house in Sherman Oaks.
Gideon Pilcher was born in 1932 in Los Angeles, the son of a furniture salesman who had come west from Ohio in 1929 and found nothing to sell furniture to. He grew up in the warehouse, was drafted in 1953, spent two years in Germany maintaining generators, and came home to a business his father had run into difficulty. He took it over at 29 and spent the next decade turning a furniture liquidator into a rental house, a change he attributed to noticing that productions kept returning things.
He was a difficult negotiator and a soft touch, sometimes on the same afternoon. He charged studios what the market bore and student productions almost nothing, an arrangement he never advertised and never denied. Three separate decorators recalled him refusing to rent a specific 1930s dining set to a production he believed would damage it, and one recalled him relenting after being shown the storyboards.
His wife of sixty-one years, Rosalind, died in 2021. He is survived by his daughter Verity, of Sherman Oaks; a son, Amos, of Portland; four grandchildren; and a great-granddaughter.
Ms. Pilcher-Nakamura said her father spent the last two years of his life on a project he undertook at Mr. Ardmore’s suggestion and then took over entirely: dictating what he remembered. There are forty-one hours of recordings. They are, she said, almost entirely unusable as a catalog — he moves between objects by association rather than category, and a single tape may cover eleven decades — and she has been told by two archivists that they are nonetheless the most valuable thing in the estate.
The last recording is from June. On it, asked by his granddaughter what the hardest thing to source had always been, he answers without hesitation.
Ordinary things, he says. Nobody keeps the ordinary things. Everybody saves the chandelier and nobody saves the kitchen chair, and then a director asks for a kitchen and you discover the whole century has thrown its kitchens away.