The new RH store was seven years in the making. It opened with a flashy party that had caviar bars and dewy-faced models, Martha Stewart and Ryan Seacrest, and Mr. Friedman, now 61, said it brought tears to his eyes.
“I was a stock boy at the Gap,” he said, speaking from London, where he hopes to open more Galleries. “I got booted out of junior college. I thought being a store manager was the best it was going to get. I though rich people had color TVs.”
Mr. Friedman’s origin story is worth knowing. His father died when he was five, and he was raised by his mother in a one-bedroom apartment in Sonoma, Calif. She was schizophrenic, and unable to work by the time he was 15. He carried a D-average at community college, and supported himself and his mother by working at the Gap. There, he was spotted by Millard “Mickey” Drexler, the veteran retailer who was then remaking the Gap into a multibillion dollar company. He promoted Mr. Friedman to store manager, and he then worked his way up to become the youngest regional manager there. After the Gap, Mr. Friedman was hired by Williams Sonoma, where he took over Pottery Barn, among other brands, and turned its tabletop business into a billion-dollar home furnishings company. He spent 14 years at Williams Sonoma, and left when he wasn’t chosen to be its C.E.O., to take over a company that was careering toward bankruptcy.
Restoration Hardware opened in 1979 as a source for old house restorers but by the late ’90s had been reimagined as a quirky housewares store, selling objects with nostalgic narratives — Italian fans and Stickley furniture, garden gnomes and office-style pencil sharpers, e.g. — to baby boomers pining for their lost youth. By 2001, it was floundering. When Mr. Friedman took it over, he shook out the gnomes and the pencil sharpeners and the board games, and brought in supersized versions of stuff that was reminiscent of the work of designers like Axel Vervoordt or Christian Liaigre. There was a steam punk period, where every object was made from riveted aluminum, and a deconstructed period, when he sold shredded French balloon chairs. It was easy to parody. It was also appealing to a new shopping cohort, men like Mr. Friedman, who wore bluejeans and T-shirts with their blazers and maybe a silver bracelet and wanted interiors to match.
In August of 2012, the year the company went public and rebranded itself as RH, Mr. Friedman, who was then divorced, stepped down as C.E.O. because he was having a relationship with a 26-year-old employee, a not uncommon practice for the time. Today, such a scenario might have played out quite differently. In its first day of trading, after Mr. Friedman rang the opening bell on the New York Stock Exchange, shares of the company rose 30 percent. Less than a year later, he was reinstated as C.E.O.
