For Daniel Lubner, legacy isn’t just something you inherit. It’s something you build—one relationship, one reinvention, one well-placed piece of furniture at a time.
When Daniel Lubner decided to follow three generations of furniture sellers and enter the family trade, his father, Clive, offered one piece of advice: Bring a pocket knife.
Daniel laughed, assuming he meant it as a joke about needing protection. But Clive was serious—he was referring to the constant stream of jammed upholstery zippers, tangled zip ties and mountains of boxes that always need opening. “No matter what my position has been in the 25-plus years I’ve been in this industry, I don’t think there’s a day that goes by where I’m not using the pocket knife,” says the CEO of design and retail firm Clive Daniel Home (CDH), who launched the company with this father in 2011.
Sure, Daniel has lost plenty over the years, and none bear family engravings. But each knife serves as a sort of heirloom, a reminder of the well-mapped path he follows.
Clive, who immigrated with his wife and two children from South Africa to Southwest Florida in the late seventies, helped grow Fort Myers’ historic Robb & Stucky (founded in 1915) from about $1 million a year in revenue to around $274 million. The Lubners made their life in Fort Myers, and though Daniel left at 17 to attend school in Tampa, his roots remained. He recalls kneeboarding on the Caloosahatchee, grilling the mud and nurse sharks he and his friends caught on the old seawall on Fort Myers’ Whiskey Creek, and selling clearance-section merchandise at the Robb & Stucky showroom in middle school.
1 of 2
Photography by Omar Cruz
Daniel Lubner Clive Daniel Home
Daniel founded Clive Daniel Home with his father, Clive, in 2011. His parents raised him to hold family history close.
2 of 2
Photography by Omar Cruz
Clive Daniel Home Sonya Lubner Memory Book
A memory book his mother, Sonya, created to chronicle their story.
At home, matriarch Sonya (known as Sunny) ensured business talk was off the table. Clive hoped his son would join the trade, but it had to be Daniel’s decision. From the sidelines, Daniel absorbed more than he realized—watching as his father quietly pushed in showroom chairs, picked up cigarette butts in the parking lot, and fine-tuned the curatorial eye that earned him industry respect. Long before they worked together, admiration and the urge to emulate had already taken root.
Over Thanksgiving dinner circa 1998, after a decade away, Daniel said it was time. He joined Robb & Stucky in an entry-level sales role at the Sarasota location, learning the ropes before returning to Fort Myers to step into leadership. The two worked side-by-side at Robb & Stucky, where they had a 25% stake until 2011, when the firm had to file for bankruptcy—one of many design companies to collapse in the wake of the housing crash and Great Recession. Undeterred, father and son opened CDH later that year.
Every piece of Daniel’s past—from his childhood in Whiskey Creek, where he’d sell backyard oranges to neighbors, to his South African heritage—shapes his identity: the capitalists on his father’s side, who handmade cabinetry for diamond barons, and the freedom fighters in his mother’s family, who stood shoulder to shoulder with Nelson Mandela during Apartheid. Daniel glances down at a photo he keeps saved on his phone of his maternal grandmother sitting beside Mandela on his 90th birthday. Daniel grew up reading stories showing his mother’s family being ostracized, and hearing about his grandmother’s time spent in prison for her membership in the South African Communist Party. “It was about the most unpopular thing you could have done at the time, so it was a true test of courage,” Daniel reflects.
Photography by Shane Long
Burroughs Home Fort Myers Daniel Lubner Clive Daniel Home
Near his childhood neighborhood of Whiskey Creek, the Burroughs Home echoes the sense of place that still grounds Daniel. Fort Myers shaped him—from selling backyard oranges to neighbors, to grilling catches from the creek’s old seawall, to working the Robb & Stucky showroom where his father built the Lubner name.
The dual inheritance—craftsmanship and enterprise on one side; conviction and community on the other—shows up in how Daniel runs the business today, through hands-on leadership, long-term loyalty and a drive to build something bigger than himself. “Those have been the cornerstones: to have a sensibility about work and a sense of fidelity,” he says.
The CDH vision was bold from the start: 87,000 square feet in the heart of Naples, designed as a gallery-like series of vignettes rather than a traditional retail floor. Employees followed the Lubners on their new venture, many taking pay cuts at first. Those early days were about survival—Daniel estimates he took five days off in the first year. He’d show up to his kids’ 9 a.m. soccer games in a suit and tie before rushing into the showroom. “That [level of commitment] was my obligation to ensure the success of the company,” he says.
On a Thursday morning in the spring, Daniel leads a tour of the 175,000-square-foot warehouse CDH debuted in 2023. Down an aisle of furniture storage, an order picker platform lifts an employee multiple stories high to retrieve a boxed credenza from one of the towering shelves. “We had a team photo shoot on there the other day,” Daniel says. In a quieter area, Artie Hatt, who’s been with the Lubners since 1978, buffs a small chip from a display cabinet headed to Port Royal.
Nearly 15 years in, CDH now spans four cities and 85 designers across residential and commercial divisions; an apprenticeship program that has paid for emerging talent to take classes and programs; and the Oriole Road warehouse that consolidates operations while maintaining the hands-on culture. The company’s 15 trucks mobilize for installations that serve hundreds of clients, with every piece getting unboxed, inspected and adjusted in-house (handles swapped, upholstery checked, finishes touched up) before dispatch. The craftsman’s attention to detail, scaled up. “People often say, when the next generation comes into the business, they screw things up,” Clive says. “In truth, Daniel’s taken the business to wonderful heights and exceeded everything I imagined.”
Photography by Omar Cruz
Daniel Lubner Clive Daniel Home
Conviction and craft run through Daniel’s lineage. “Those have been the cornerstones: to have a sensibility about work and a sense of fidelity,” says the CEO, who has grown CDH to four locations across South Florida, anchored by a 175,000-square-foot warehouse.
CDH recently launched a home automation division and home watch service to help clients maintain their properties in the off-season—a service born as much out of instinct as strategy. When Hurricane Irma knocked out power in 2017, Daniel told the team to stay home and promised they’d be paid. The drivers showed up anyway. “If you’re paying us, we’re working,” one said. So they turned outward, helping clients and neighbors clean up and recover. They operate similarly day-to-day, doing what they can, where they can—whether it’s opening their event-friendly showrooms for a PACE Center for Girls or The Shelter for Abused Women & Children fundraiser or helping a client pressure wash their patio. “It’s in our DNA to do all this stuff,” Daniel says. “Now we’re just putting a name on it.”
In his household, legacy is an open invitation. Daniel’s wife, Cathy, serves on CDH’s merchandising team and directs product lines for the showrooms. Two of his sons are grown, and he’s made it clear that the family business is theirs to pursue—or not.
When Daniel joined his father’s journey, their relationship deepened—those childhood dinner table rules began to bend as the discussed what they were creating together. Today, as Daniel takes point in business, he still turns to his father frequently for advice. “There are those times when you just want to be father and son, but knowing with my father that I’ve had the ultimate supporter in my corner and the ultimate mentor has been wonderful,” he says. Clive views Daniel with nothing but pride—especially as he’s watched him grow in fatherhood. The elder Lubner acknowledges he and his generation were less involved in their kids’ lives as they fought to provide for their families. But Daniel has always made the time to be there for his boys. “He counsels them, corrects them. They look up to him,” Clive says. They both dream of having that fifth generation join their ranks, but they’ll never force it.
1 of 2
Photography by Omar Cruz
Daniel Lubner Clive Daniel Home
Now 50, Daniel finds himself at the helm—part of the generation shaping the future of the place that shaped him.
2 of 2
Photography by Omar Cruz
Daniel Lubner Clive Daniel Home
Last year, when Daniel turned 50, the milestone hit him with a jolt: He and his peers are now the ones in charge of the community’s future. The reality rattled him—when did that happen? At times, he still feels like the boy who took risky leaps into the warm waters near the Fort Myers Power Plant. He looks to friends like Fort Myers chef Harold Balink, who Daniel has followed through different endeavors, for inspiration on how to lead—the pair regularly catch up for a meal. “You have these friendly faces that you get to grow up with and, in my case, grow old with,” Daniel says. Those relationships motivate him to do better and invest in the community that raised him and his kids. If nothing else, he wants his children to have a home worth returning to. “I think it all starts and ends with family.”