The French designer and architect Marc Held has worked across various media, forms, and dimensions, from teapots to automobiles, and wristwatches to cruise ship interiors. His intrigue with the possibilities of kinetics in furniture design drove him to develop the “Culbuto” furniture series in 1967. Made up of a low-back armchair, a high-back armchair and...
Resembling a child’s toy more than a piece of furniture, the whimsical form of the Spun Chair, designed by Thomas Heatherwick and his team, Heatherwick Studio, came about in answer to the question, ‘Can a rotationally symmetrical form make a comfortable chair?’ Heatherwick and his colleagues were initially inspired by the traditional manufacturing process of...
This rocking chair was made in Indiana, where Amish first settled in the 1840s, and boasts hickory twigs bent to form its symmetrical sides and oak slats evenly arranged to form its seat. The dramatic contours of this chair ensure that it is at once attractive and comfortable. This graceful form is achieved by bending...
What did George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, General Knox, and Benjamin Franklin have in common? Windsor chairs. These chairs were first produced in England in the very first years of the 18th century. Although many folk tales surround the origin of the name (including some involving George III caught in a rain storm), it is likely...
Lurelle Guild was a prolific industrial designer, producing useful and beautiful objects that modernized the American home spanning from vacuum cleaners to canapé plates. Guild’s usual method was to invent or develop the new product, patent it, and then assign the patent to the manufacturer, charging a fee and royalties. In 1933 and 1934 he...
This desk is an example of the Italian interpretation of the Art Nouveau style, known as Stile Floreale. This desk model was exhibited by Carlo Zen, a Milanese furniture manufacturer, at the 1902 First International Exposition of Modern Decorative Arts, in Turin, Italy. The exhibition helped Italy to show the rest of the world that...
The Cross Check Chair is named after a hockey infraction in which a player holds their stick vertically and blocks another player, illegally checking them. The name is also a reference to the seat of this chair, which is made out of interwoven maple plywood strips, creating a check pattern, and a double meaning of...
An opulent bed, almost completely dominated by its hangings, pushes at the edges of the border in this etching by the French designer and architect, Daniel Marot. This design is for a state bed (lit d’apparat), a bed that was purely ceremonial rather than functional, and kept in royal palaces and aristocratic residences in the...
After World War II, design boomed in Europe. Colors were brighter, lines more dynamic and materials more industrial—affordable modernism emerged to feed thriving consumers in the 1950s. The now iconic Homemaker tableware line started as a challenge for young English designer Enid Seeney. She was tasked with creating an “all-over” pattern for fashionable rimless plates....
