- Yeah, it's just like anybody who's, you know, interested in expensive cars, I guess eventually you get to Ferraris or Lamborghinis or a Bugatti, same thing if you're interested in handmade furniture.

You're gonna find your way to Molesworth.

It's just inevitable.

- Molesworth can be described in many ways, but, I guess, for me, he was the creative guy behind taking relatively mild interpretations of rustic furniture and moving it up.

He's the guy who made it, let me just say, romantic furniture.

He really enlivened that spirit of the West within each of us.

- Molesworth was really an art student.

He went to the Art Institute of Chicago in the height of the Arts and Crafts Movement.

And he ended up, you know, in Montana, and then he came down to Cody and then he started this sort of furniture store that was just everyday offerings.

And then he started experimenting with what we would now call Western-style objects and functional pieces, and it didn't take long.

That became his thing.

- Molesworth ended up being a marketing genius.

You know, he put catalogs out, but more than anything, he really, really learned to mingle with his customers.

He became friends of many, and these were titans of industry.

You think about the fact Robert Woodruff, Coca-Cola, the Koch family, Standard Oil, titans of industry that he is rubbing elbows with and all of their friends.

And so one commission led to the next.

I bought a collection that George Ragner had bought in Pennsylvania.

As part of that, I got some of the original invoices, which was really cool.

So Molesworth had Ed Grigware do this little watercolor drawing of his chair.

Then he sent this note to him telling him the chairs were 350 bucks a piece, which I thought, wow.

And George Ragner had a lot of means.

He was one of the steel magnates from Pittsburgh, and he bought these chairs, but $350 for a lounge chair at the time, probably equivalent to like $10,000 now.

So his furniture was not inexpensive.

- [Billy] At first, I was shocked at how high the prices were.

I could get, you know, ranch furniture chairs, 75, a hundred, 150 bucks, you know, an armoire, two, 300.

And the keyhole chairs, you know, were running 800, 900, $1,100.

I thought, oh my God.

And then I saw a sideboard, which is in the front foyer, and it was 10,500.

And I whined and bitched and complained and bought it.

- [Wally] I mean, some of it was humorous, some of it was in your face, some it was, I can't tell you he ever made a quiet piece.

He took burls, and most people are familiar with burls as it's the burl dash on a Jaguar or Mercedes got this wonderful, now Molesworth cut the burl down the middle, took both sides and placed it on the corners of a chair.

And I mean, that's just audacious.

The moose antler wing chair, okay, you have this wonderful chair that has these moose antlers on it, you think, wow.

- [Terry] Molesworth never, ever cut his quality.

I think he would rather probably have gone out of business than changed the way he did things.

He always used the finest leather.

The finishes were better, you know, all the little details.

One of the big things, but maybe not that popular today, but I know Molesworth probably saw Italian furniture wrapped in leather at one of his yearly stops at the Art Institute in Chicago.

And so in the 50s, he started wrapping furniture with leather.

And the stuff is amazing.

Eighty, 90 years later, it's still in good condition.

And that was appealing to the audience at the time.

And I never saw his competitors do that.

- [Chase] I think of him often in the same category as Frank Lloyd Wright in some ways.

Because when Wright was allowed to really run with things, he actually, not only crafted the whole environments, he would design the dishes and even the dress that the hostess would wear.

And Molesworth, if he could have gotten away with designing the clothing for the hostess, it was entertaining in one of his interiors, I'm sure he would have.

- [Wally] A room scape to me as much like a landscape.

And when you deal with a guy like Molesworth, he built that whole landscape within the room that took the furniture, the lighting, the drapery, the floor coverings and all of that and put it together in a, I suppose, a version of the real West.

And within that there was art, there was native readings, native materials, wonderful beaded objects.

(gentle music) - [Billy] This is like really like living inside the Sistine Chapel.

This is the best of the best.

I like to tell people when I'm sitting at my breakfast table in the morning, having a cup of coffee and reading the newspaper, my net worth went up just by the fact I was sitting in a Molesworth chair.

It may have gone up five or 8 cents that day.

That's pretty cool stuff.