Kennedy Chair – ThriveFurniture
This particular piece, while not a copy of any specific vintage chair – although it is very close to the iconic Poul Jensen Z chair for Selig – is gorgeous in its own right, and would look great in any MCM setting. I’d love to have a couple of them facing my Knoll sofa, with a Saarinen tulip cocktain table with a wooden top separating them.
Florence Knoll Style Sullivan Sofa – ThriveFurniture
This is not the classic sofa. Call it what you will: an homage, a knockoff, a clone, a replica, whatever. It looks like that sofa, but it is not.
Now, there are many arguments around this issue. Is it fair to the manufacturer, Knoll, which charges twelve grand and up for this piece, to sell this lookalike for a thousand dollars? Probably not, depending on what metric you use for “fairness.”
On the other hand, the trademark/copyright for this piece is now many, many decades old, and better thinkers than I have made a strong case that the Framers of the US constitution did not intend for that protection to last anywhere near that long.
I tend to view it from a somewhat different viewpoint: The intention of the designers who created MCM furniture like this was to use the (at the time) new mass production methods and materials to create beautiful, functional, and inexpensive furniture for Everyman. It was supposed to be (in current parlance) “furniture for the rest of us.”
It has, instead, become vastly expensive, so much so that it is really furniture for rich people now, and I think that makes a travesty of the original intentions of its creators. In any event, I’ll be running a fair amount of these posts, with sourcing for items you might like to use in your own home, at quite reasonable costs.
If, for instance, you click on the link at the top of either this post, or this page, and end up purchasing the piece, MCMI will receive a commission on the sale, which will go to help support the blog – a win-win situation for all of us, it seems to me. You get a gorgeous piece of MCM-styled furniture, and we get a modest emolument against expenses here.
If you’d like a set of these (or just one) to complement your Knoll-style sofa, just click the pic!
Florence Knoll famously deprecated her work with these iconic pieces by claiming she was only “filling in the spaces” with “meat and potatoes” furniture.
Some meat. Some potatoes.
Second Life Marketplace – POST: Lonsdale Mid-Century Modern Ashtray Stand
Heh. In this day and age, a “stand” designed just to hold your booze, cigs, and table lighter would probably be considered sinful.
I remember those days fondly, though.
Vintage Vantage: Mid-Century Modern Furniture | Brooklyn Based
Maybe it’s our Mad Men obsession. Or maybe we’ve eaten one Swedish meatball too many at the IKEA cafeteria, but lately we’ve been drawn to mid-century design.
We chatted with vintage furniture experts to put together a buying guide for newcomers to the market. Mid-century furniture, especially pieces designed by icons like Herman Miller, George Nakashima and Charles and Ray Eames, is highly collectible and can be quite pricey. There are plenty of beautiful items out there that aren’t signed by designers and don’t carry the higher price tag that goes along with that, though. And, as Richard Wright, founder of Wright, Inc. in Chicago, one of the best-known mid-century auction houses in the country, points out, even with high-end mid-century furniture, “$10,000 buys a lot in this world. You get a lot of value for that investment.”
Excellent info article on collecting MCM furniture. And a nice pic of some iconic Cherner chairs, eh?
ORIGINAL Seconda BKF Butterfly Chair in Premium by LifestyleByCara
From LifestyleByCara
I never much liked these chairs. For some reason I always associated them with cheap, cheap, cheap – usually because whenever I saw them, they were the canvas variety rotting away on some midwestern patio. There is no denying, however, that they are one of the iconic MCM chair forms, and one of the best-selling chairs of all time.
Rapson Rockers: Mid-century Modern Classics Resurrected after 60 years
Although best known for his career as an architect, Ralph Rapson designed furniture for Knoll in the ’40s after befriending Florence Knoll at the Cranbrook School. Post his death, his family put his designs back into production and these mid-century modern classics are now available for sale again after 60+ years.
This is kind of an interesting piece, because, although the design is nearly sixty years old, it hews very, very close to an even earlier design – the Grasshopper Chair by Eero Saarinen.
Eames poster art print Mid Century Modern by WeaversofSouthsea
From WeaversofSouthsea
I like posters like these. In moderation, of course.
Arch.itect.us: architecture from the edge….
I like this room a lot. In fact, I like the whole house a lot. Check out the entire photospread.
Actually, check out the entire site. They’ve got some spectacular photography there.
The Secrets of Modernism — LiveModern: Your Best Modern Home
You’d think with the amount of time we architects spend in school, all the esoteric titles on our book-shelves, and the cryptic language we use amongst one another at dinner parties that the keys to understanding modernism would be complicated, scholarly and difficult to comprehend. You’d be led to believe that the fruits of modern design are only achieved after years of study and monastic-like internships; the culmination of having actually read all of those books on our shelves. It’s what many of us architects would like you to believe. These diversions do a good job of justifying why we write “manifestos” that nobody understands and they validate why we need to take out a second mortgage to afford all of those linen hardcover books.
But the fact of the matter is that good modern design can be boiled down to a handful of basic principles; principles that you don’t need a Ph.D. in architecture to understand. Today’s post is an explanation of five simple codes of modernism. Over the years, we’ve found that these 5 are present in almost every good example of modernism and they matter more than all of the obscure styles, trends and fashions put together. Granted, good modern design requires more than just these principles, but these 5 will get you most of the way there.
1. Line things up. Seriously, just line things up. As simple and obvious as this sounds, we’re constantly blown-away at the variety of architecture out there with features that should line up, but don’t. And as soon as you notice, you can’t stop noticing. One of our favorite examples of lining things up gets built into every home and commercial space that we do. We have a simple diagram on our cover sheet indicating that all door handles, light switches, shower controls and towel bars are to vertically align (basically anything that you reach out to touch or operate occurs in the same plane). You may not cognitively recognize what’s going on in a home where everything aligns, there’s just a visual harmony that works. But once you do notice, well…
Read the whole thing. Seriously. This isn’t rocket science we’re talking about here. No need to complicate things unnecessarily.
Understanding “Mid-Century Modern” – The Hour Publishing Company: Real Estate
The term mid-century modern is sometime mistaken as any style structure built between the1940′s and 1960′s. It’s more than that, a distinctive form of architecture sometimes called “California Contemporary,” mid century modern architecture is usually defined through its clean lines, open floor plans, walls of glass, and the feeling of living within nature. These buildings constructed between the 1940′s through the late 1960′s by innovative architects with their simplistic styles were ahead of their time. Norwalk, Westport, Weston, Stamford, and especially New Canaan all have some very fine examples of this type of architecture currently for sale.
I like to highlight these sorts of articles when I find them. Their continued publication helps keep the MCM ethos alive.
House of the Week: Mid-Century Modern Masterpiece (VIDEO) | Zillow Blog
I love that wavy, curving roof. Check out the entire slideshow. It’s a good one!
Vintage Industrial/Mid Century Modern Plywood Side Chair by CoMod
This wonderful plywood side chair was found from an all girls college dorm in Missouri. The chair is in good vintage condition. There is normal wear to the plywood and metal legs. No chips or cracks to the wood. All of the metal glides are intact. There is some light chipping of the paint on the metal legs. This unique chair is perfect for dinner table or work table height.
This kinda sorta has an Eamesish look to it, doesn’t it? OTOH, what it really looks like is every high school and college chair I planted my rear on back in the day.
A set of these make a pretty nice complement to any MCM table, though.
PLASTOLUX “keep it modern” » HG CONCRETE + WOOD + STEEL TABLE by Gore Design Co.
I am totally digging on this custom table by Gore Design Co. The mix of materials, steel, wood and concrete make for a really warm feeling modern industrial piece. How perfect does it go with the Eames DCM chairs? Let me answer that for you…..PERFECT!
What ties this all together is the base, an engineering marvel and a study in minimalism. I was adamant that both surfaces be unified by a singular support structure with four legs. Christian and I welded this piece-by-piece, and had to make design revisions on the fly to stiffen certain sections. The end product is a wabi-sabi modern piece with a nod to mid-century modern icons.
This does look great.
Mid Century Modern Scoop Chair by Carter Bros. Furniture
From TheModernHistoric
You’ll run across these chairs every once in a while in thrift and jumble stores. For a long time, it was fairly difficult to figure out their provenance, but the Internet took care of that.
I even owned one of them once.
braxton and yancey: Mid-Century Modern Homes
11 of 11Check out the rest of the photospread! Great stuff!
Build Blog » 10 Forgotten Lessons of Mid-Century Modern Design
4. Connecting the inside to the outside creates harmony with the site. One of the subtlest, albeit most pleasing, design moves in MCM design is the intentional move to extend the material of a wall from inside to outside (or vice versa). This could be an exterior brick wall that extends into an entry area or an interior cedar wall that continues out to frame a courtyard.
5. Old school passive design is highly sustainable. There are a lot of terms being thrown around these days; sustainability, passive house design, and the overly abused “green-design”. Whether these terms actually benefit the home or environment depends on the situation, but the classic examples of passive design are so sensible that they should be incorporated into every house (and without throwing around a bunch of marketing terms). One of the best examples of this occurs at the roof: well designed eaves are calibrated to keep the interiors shaded during the summer months but allow direct sunlight into the home during the chilly winters. Smart, cost-effective and sensible.
6. Small, efficient bedrooms are perfectly pleasant. Bedrooms don’t need to incorporate lounge areas and recreational space; that’s what lounges and rec-rooms are for. Often with the smaller bedrooms we see in MCM homes, the ergonomics are more deliberate and the view out the window is more appreciated. Smaller bedrooms also cause the family to spend more time together rather than secluding everyone in their own bedrooms all day playing X-Box.
Exactly. I’ve never been a big fan of those giant bedrooms that are really studio apartments in their own right. I’d much prefer a glass wall that would let me wake up to pristing forest views. Hah. Like that’s gonna happen!
Von Dutch CEO and clothier lists Beverly Hills home | Detroit Free Press
Tonny Sorensen has listed his remodeled house in Beverly Hills at $6.9 million. / Los Angeles Times
I really do like this room, kinda sorta.
iowahawk: It’s a Mod, Mod, Mod, Mod World
Besides hot rods and cheap beer, I am also a sucker for the clean, minimalist postwar industrial design revolution which has become known as Midcentury Modern. Enough of a sucker that me and my lovely missus make an annual February pilgrimage west to attend Palm Springs Modernism Week. Last weekend was our 6th, sandwiched between some fun in Los Angeles. Please to enjoy some photo highlights; if you’re in SoCal this weekend, take a trip out to the desert and enjoy some stylish Rat Pack fun during Mod Week’s concluding days.
A great photo spread.
Modern Etsy: Cast & Crew | 2Modern Blog
Looking for some sweet vintage wares to add a real retro detail or two to your modern home? We’re liking the items available in the Etsy store Cast & Crew. They’ve got a simple catalog of items, from Mid-Century Modern furniture pieces to fox pelts to old technology. Their art direction of their images is also very inspiring. We’ve already spotted a few things we’d like from this store!
Actually, me, too!
How to Achieve the Mid-Century Modern Aesthetic
Ready to decorate? Here are some tips for helping you achieve a mid-century modern aesthetic in your own home.
1. Use a bold interior color palette – choose two or three bright colors for emphasis, then accent with whites and natural textures.
2. Hang up a vintage, or vintage-inspired, wall clock – the Sunburst clock by George Nelson was especially popular during the 1950s and 1960s.
3. Discover sleek accessories and furniture – such as a trio of hour-glass shaped vases, a cylindrical ceiling light, or a low-profile bed.
3. Shop Ikea – and other stores that offer affordable furniture and home accessories in the simplicity of Scandinavian style.
4. Let the sunshine in – mid-century modern homes were often built with expansive panes of glass. Update your window coverings, opting for something light and airy to brighten your home.
Good advice.
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