The Napoleon of Your Living Room

Gary Friedman, who runs RH (formerly Restoration Hardware), is out to conquer the world, one luxurious sofa at a time. Next stop, Waterloo?

Gary Friedman hates meetings. A 66-year-old with apparently limitless energy and a perpetual tan, Mr. Friedman is the chief executive of RH, one of the country’s largest high-end furniture sellers, and he never holds meetings. Instead, he convenes “adventures.”

To the untrained eye, these look and sound a lot like meetings. But there is a difference. Adventures can last 10 hours, or more.

That’s a typical stretch for Mr. Friedman’s adventures with his architecture and design team, a group of about 20 executives overseeing one of the priciest expansions in the history of American retail. The company is doubling the number of stores, called “galleries” in RH speak, with 35 new ones in the works. Many will cost $20 million or more.

RH sold $3 billion worth of products last year, but Mr. Friedman’s goal is not just to move $10,000 sectional sofas, most of them in earth tones and a style that could be called California Rich. He wants to forge a brand that is so ubiquitous — RH restaurants, RH hotels, RH clothing — that its impact is global.

“I don’t really talk about our vision for the company to Wall Street because they might lock me up,” Mr. Friedman said one recent afternoon, sitting in an RH restaurant not far from headquarters in a suburb of San Francisco. “But our vision is to create an endless reflection of hope, inspiration and love that will ignite the human spirit and change the world.”