Robert Currey receives the Museum of Design Atlanta's Design Legend Award

Home Accents Today Staff -- Home Accents Today, 11/9/2012 9:41:38 AM

Robert CurreyATLANTA -- Currey & Company founder Robert B. Currey received the inaugural Design Legend Award last week at the Museum of Design Atlanta.

The museum presented Currey with the award during its Gala Preview for The South's Next Wave: Design Challenge, a show that is part exhibition, part competition featuring more than 40 cutting edge interior and object designers from the Southeast.

Currey is the first to receive the Design Legend Award, which will be presented annually by the museum. Honorees are chosen on the basis of design excellence, innovation and contribution to their field of design both locally and nationally.

"Mr. Currey has made a vital contribution to the Atlanta design community and the South since 1969," according to a press release announcing the award.

Currey is "sort of retired," the company states, from a lifetime in the home furnishings business and spends most of his time around his 1843 house and gardens in downtown Sparta, Ga., where he has created a sustainable market garden. He is also the non-executive chairman of Currey & Company, and serves on the board of directors of Rock-Tenn Company, a vertically integrated paper company.

Currey was born and raised in Chattanooga, Tenn. He joined the Army after high school and returned three years later to attend Oglethorpe University in Atlanta, where he received a Bachelor of Arts degree.

In 1969, he started his own retail home furnishings company, Storehouse. When he left the company in 1982, it had grown to 28 stores. Currey spent the 1980s consulting within the furniture industry and running the U.S. sales organization of an Italian garden furniture manufacturer. A product development job and a retail venture led to his current business, Currey & Company, a manufacturer of lighting, furniture and garden products with plants in Atlanta, Angeles City in the Philippines and in Humen, China.

Today, he continues to pursue his lifelong interest in gardening with the planting of the grounds around his old house in Sparta and organic gardening efforts on his property there. He grows crops year-round using a no-till, all over mulch method in a farm and garden effort known as Elm Street Gardens.