Brad Pitt Debuts Furniture Collection
O'BRIEN: Welcome back, everybody. Brad Pitt is an award-winning actor, father, producer, won "People's" magazine sexiest man alive, twice, I think. Now you can add furniture designer to his name. He is debuting his first collection of 12 original pieces of furniture this week. It's a collaboration with luxury furniture maker, Frank Pollaro. It's nice to have you with us. Your stuff is really like art work.</s>FRANK POLLARO, PRESIDENT OF POLLARO CUSTOM FURNITURE, INC: We've been building museum quality furniture for 25 years and the people who collect it are people who collect art and functional art.</s>O'BRIEN: So before we get into the back story of how you started working with a guy whose day job is really to be an actor, I wanted to show some of the pieces first. It's absolutely stunning, but looks like a challenge certainly in the engineering.</s>POLLARO: Well, brad has a unique vision when he gets into a piece like this and we try to realize that in every way that we can. And we try to follow every line and engineering those lines are not always easy. What I like about him, about brad is that he listens and he's thoughtful. That's the reason I spend time with him. He's good at what he does and I think he -- yes, he puts his mind into it. He understands engineering on some level and helps us.</s>O'BRIEN: You understand it more so you help him.</s>POLLARO: Yes.</s>O'BRIEN: Let's take a look at the bed, which is stunning. A 3,000 man hours of work went into this bed is what I read. Is that correct?</s>POLLARO: That's correct, just about 3,000 hours. There was a lot of research and development. We took a lot of time to give him what he wanted in the piece, which was a continuous line. His vision was for a line and we decided we're going to make it that way and it required rebuilding the bed probably five or six times before we got it right.</s>O'BRIEN: Bathtub.</s>POLLARO: Bathtub, started with a 30,000 pound block of marble and he had about five different designs and we selected this one together. We engineered the inside of the bathtub like we would engineer a club chair so it's comfortable.</s>BERMAN: Does he use these? Do you know if he has some of these at home? Is this something that Brad --</s>POLLARO: The pieces we unveiled this week are the first time they've been shown. So some of them are going into his homes, yes, this is pretty exciting.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That bathtub looks amazing.</s>O'BRIEN: It's supposed to be comfortable.</s>POLLARO: It looks totally like art. Sculptural art and it is comfortable. When you get into a bathtub it's always uncomfortable. We wanted to make it beautiful and comfortable.</s>O'BRIEN: I need a comfortable bathtub, darn it. That thing is no --</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Are these reasonably affordable?</s>POLLARO: I would not say they're generally affordable.</s>O'BRIEN: You're so cute. No, not even close. They're collector's items. Why would someone who is known mostly as a Hollywood actor would want to try his hand as a furniture designer?</s>POLLARO: He has been sketching for literally 20 years. We built a piece of furniture for him. When I saw them I said let's make some of these three dimensional. By the amount of times we talk during a week, I know where his head is. He's really into it. He is excited about it. He enjoys it. We have a lot of fun doing it together and he's very dedicated to it.</s>CAIN: He has always been a fan of architecture, whether you talk about Frank Lloyd Wright, architecture, interior design.</s>POLLARO: He sees the furniture as small architecture, complete architecture in a small form.</s>O'BRIEN: It's absolutely beautiful. Congratulations on the collection. It's nice to have you on the show. We appreciate it.</s>POLLARO: Thank you. We're excited about it.</s>O'BRIEN: No, not affordable at all. I have a bathtub that's affordable. That's not. It's nice to have you. We'll take a short break. We're back in just a moment.