The Trusted home of the world’s finest pianos since 1928
The Trusted home of the world’s finest pianos since 1928
The Baldwin Piano is one of America's most important and famous piano brands and is designed, engineered and headquartered in the USA. For more than 150 years Baldwin has been known as America's favorite piano. For good reason too, because nearly everyone knows someone who has a 
Baldwin in their family or a friend who has a Baldwin grand or remember the Baldwin in the school they attended. For those old enough to remember Liberace and piano man Billy Joel playing Baldwin.
The company was founded by Dwight Hamilton Baldwin a Cincinnati music educator. He started it with $2,000 he saved from teaching for seven years. He used the money to start his own retail piano shop in 1862 selling Chickering, Steinway, Decker Brothers, and Vose pianos as well as Estey Reed organs and a small number of pianos manufactured by The Ohio Valley Piano Co. sold under the D.H. Baldwin & Co. name.
In 1899 Baldwin passed and Wulsin purchased Baldwin's estate guiding the company from retail to manufacturing. Baldwin won their first major award the "Grand Prix" in Paris in 1912. This was the first American manufactured piano to win such an award. In 1865 Baldwin hired Lucien Wulsin as a bookkeeper and in 1873 offered him a full partnership in the company. In 1887 Steinway made one of the biggest errors in their history. They cancelled Baldwin as a Steinway & Sons piano dealer thereby creating Steinway's biggest domestic competitor of the 20th century. This cancellation led the Baldwin company to begin designing and building their own pianos and organs. In 1889 they acquired the Hamilton organ company of Chicago and the following year established the Baldwin Piano Company. Their goal was to put the Baldwin brand on only the highest quality pianos made.
Baldwin, like many other manufacturers, began building wildly successful player pianos in the 1920s. A piano factory was constructed in Cincinnati, Ohio. The player piano models became unpopular by the end of the 1920s, which, coupled with the beginning of the Great Depression, could have spelled disaster for Baldwin. However, the company's president, Lucien Wulsin II, had created a large reserve fund for such situations, and Baldwin was able to ride out the market downturn while many other companies closed for good.
At the end of World War II Baldwin immediately reset their goals on challenging Steinway on the concert stage. Baldwin pianos were routinely seen in movies, television and the concert stage thanks in part to Hollywood Piano. Many of the most famous pianists, conductors, performers institutions and venues depended on the Baldwin piano for their artistic and creative inspiration. By 1953 the company had doubled production figures from prewar levels. In 1946, Baldwin introduced its first electronic organ (developed in 1941) which became so successful that the company changed its name to the Baldwin Piano & Organ Company. In 1961, Lucien Wulsin III became president. By 1963, the company had acquired C. Bechstein Pianofortefabrik and remained its owner until 1986. In 1965, Baldwin constructed a new piano manufacturing plant in Conway, Arkansas, originally to manufacture upright pianos: by 1973, the company had built 1,000,000 upright pianos.
Seeing a good opportunity Gibson Guitar purchased the company adding Baldwin to their growing family of brands. Being a global company and realizing the costs of continuing to manufacture pianos in the USA would make their products non-competitively priced in the world market, they choose to move all production to China in 2008 and set up their own factories to build their own piano their own way.
Baldwin operated and ran a major concert and artist program which was second only to Steinway. Many distinguished musicians had chosen to compose, perform and record using Baldwin pianos over the years, including the pianists Walter Gieseking, Claudio Arrau, Jorge Bolet, Earl Wild and José Iturbi and the composers Aaron Copland, Philip Glass, Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, Leonard Bernstein, Steven Sondheim and John Williams. Baldwin pianos have been used by popular entertainers who are or at one time were official Baldwin artists including Ray Charles, Liberace, Richard Carpenter, Billy Joel, Michael Feinstein, Paul Schaffer, Carly Simon, Dave Brubeck, Benfolds, Dick Hyman, George Shearing, Marian McPartland, Armenia Adams, Clay Aiken, Monty Alexander, Dave Brubeck,
The Hollywood Piano Showroom has been the #1 Los Angeles Baldwin Piano Dealer since the 40's and continues to deliver quality Baldwin pianos to clients throughout the San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles, Burbank, Pasadena and Southern California.
Every year our industry selects the 100 Top Dealers in the world. We’ve been selected 10 times!
Our value added warranty doubles the original warranty. Plus it’s transferable
Whenever you’re ready for a different piano you can bring it back and change it for life!
The Wulsin family made it be known that they intended to compete on the concert stage directly with Steinway and to promote the piano on the silver screen. In the early 40's Hollywood Piano became the Baldwin agent for the Los Angeles area to help them achieve their goals in film and for Los Angeles Baldwin Piano sales, rentals and service. The company immediately made inroads with Baldwin in the movies and on the concert stage. Then World War II came and the government ordered all manufacturers of pianos to cease piano manufacturing and put their energy toward the war effort. Baldwin engineers designed techniques for laminating wood for airplanes. What the company learned by constructing plywood aircraft wings contributed to the development of their famous pinblock design, a version of which is still used today. 
In modern times the Baldwin company diversified into banking and finance. It became one of the nations largest financial services companies showing up on the Fortune 500. When things went sour for the giant company the piano division was sold to management. This was about the same time many American manufacturers of a broad range of products from automobiles to pianos fell behind foreign competition who were offering lower priced and more consistent quality products. During this time there were number of the remaining American manufacturers who closed or were purchased including American Aeolian, Wurlitzer, (purchased by Baldwin), Sohmer, Universal Player, Story & Clark, Falcone, and Kimball. Of the old time piano companies from the 1800s only Baldwin, Mason & Hamlin and Steinway & Sons remained after the dust settled. All of these three remaining piano companies also went through purchases by outsiders or total restructuring.