This series looks at the stories behind iconic designs from each decade, starting in 1900. This installment covers Random and Beat lights, Louis Ghost and Masters chairs, city toile wallpaper and more.
Design in the 20th century ran the gamut, from the “less is more” minimalism of Mies van der Rohe to the “less is a bore” maximalism of Robert Venturi, and from the “more for less” prescience of R. Buckminster Fuller to the “less and more” paradox of Dutch collective Droog. Where design is headed in the 21st century is too soon to say, but the following icons-in-the-making, many of which show historical and global influences, point the way. So do the projects in which these products appear, with designers often employing sustainable practices and adaptive-reuse or infill-development strategies to address threats to our environment and a demand for urban housing.
Previous: Design Through the Decades: The 1990s
Normandy Remodeling
LEM Bar Stool
The simple and elegant LEM bar stool, by Japanese designers and then-partners Shin and Tomoko Azumi, earned the Product of the Year title at the FX International Interior Design Awards in 2000. Sharing a name with the trailblazing Lunar Excursion Module, it combines a swiveling, low-back seat and a pedestal base with either a fixed height or a height that adjusts via a lever-operated gas cylinder. It’s manufactured by Italy’s Lapalma.
In this new transitional-style kitchen, LEM bar stools tie in with the professional-style stainless steel appliances (stainless steel was the color of the decade, according to architect and Houzz contributor Bud Dietrich) and tuck under the counter for an uncluttered look on the dining side of the 3-by-6½-foot island. Stephanie Bryant of Chicago-area design-build firm Normandy Remodeling used the island not only to offer seating and storage, but also to provide separation between the open plan’s cooking and living areas. Classic white cabinetry creates a striking contrast with walls painted in trendy Chelsea Gray from Benjamin Moore. The materials palette includes Caesarstone perimeter counters in Pebble, a Carrara marble tile backsplash and slab island counter, and natural maple flooring.
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A3 Architects, Inc.
Random Pendant Light
Dutch designers Marcel Wanders and Casper Vissers founded furniture and lighting company Moooi in 2001 to give the Netherlands’ young creatives a chance to get their ideas into mass production. The name comes from the Dutch word for beautiful, mooi, with an extra O thrown in to signify the extra specialness of the company’s products. A year later, it introduced Bertjan Pot’s diaphanous Random pendant light to great acclaim.
Pot spent three years wrapping and gluing different materials around inflated balloons before hitting upon the pendant’s successful mix of glass-fiber yarn and epoxy resin. The light has a bulb housing on a stiff metal rod and a round hole through which the mold is removed and the bulb is changed. Unusually, the hole is not at the top but rather somewhere at the side, giving the light its Random name. The fixture comes in three sizes in black or white.
In this photo, a trio of Random lights over a custom dining table of sustainably harvested walnut, plus another pair in the high-ceilinged living space out of view in the foreground, illuminate the great room in an energy-efficient Massachusetts house by green-building specialist A3 Architects. The firm designed the home to produce as much energy as it uses, in part by taking advantage of its passive solar siting, specifying triple-paned windows and doors and calling for insulation with high R values (the measure of insulation’s ability to resist heat traveling through it). The cypress interior wall at left has three clerestory windows to bring sunlight from the great room into the pantry, mudroom and half bath on the other side. A door that slides on a barn door track is a space-saving and 21st-century touch.
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Nexus Designs
Carbon Chair
Pot employed a similar technique using epoxy resin-soaked carbon fiber for his two-piece Carbon chair, issued by Moooi in 2004.
Nexus Designs positioned a pair of the strong yet light chairs and a vivid yellow desk behind a sofa to carve out this office area in a Manhattan loft brimming with iconic seating by Arne Jacobsen, Hans Wegner and Fernando and Humberto Campana.
DNM Architecture
Raimond Pendant Light
This great room, in a new custom house in San Francisco by architect David Marlatt and interior designer Doyle McCullar, features a different large illuminated ball: Raimond Puts’ silvery, LED-studded Raimond pendant for Moooi.
Puts, a math teacher and engineer, constructed inner and outer spherical polyhedrons from thin strips of stainless steel, connected at the triangle vertices with tiny bulbs — 252 of them in the largest of the fixture’s three sizes. (See it up close here.) Building on the 2007 pendant light’s popularity, Moooi in 2015 debuted a floor version based on a prototype by Puts, who passed away in 2012. It has fingers of oak cradling the sphere.
Marlatt, whose client wanted a LEED-certified house that avoided cliches of green design, faced the additional challenge of a north-oriented site with a small building envelope. Incorporating a wall of translucent, R7-insulated polycarbonate panels from Gallina was one of the many strategies he used to achieve the residence’s LEED Platinum rating from the U.S. Green Building Council. The panels provide privacy and loads of natural light with less heat gain than glass.
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Архитектурная студия Chado
Smoke Furniture
Moooi had another hit with Dutch designer Maarten Baas’ Smoke furniture collection, conceived as his Design Academy Eindhoven graduation project in 2002. Finding furniture uniquely worn from use and time more beautiful and interesting than flawless, symmetrical and identical objects right off an assembly line, Baas gathered secondhand pieces and singed them with a blowtorch, artfully removing a scroll here and a chandelier arm there. Then he preserved their fragile charred surfaces with layers of epoxy resin, giving them a lacquer-like shine.
Архитектурная студия Chado
Moooi promptly put several pieces into production, including these dining chairs seen in a Russian home designed by Chado Architectural Studio. In his ongoing search for beauty, Baas proceeded to torch antiques and furniture classics, including Gerrit Rietveld’s Red Blue chair, Ettore Sottsass’ Carlton bookcase room divider and the Campana brothers’ Favela chair — all fuel, he says, for the next steps in design.
Randall Architects
Fjord Furniture
Jacobsen’s midcentury modern Swan chair inspired the upholstered foam-and-steel Fjord chair, by Spanish architect-designer Patricia Urquiola, who essentially cut the Swan in half and removed one of its arms. It’s part of her Scandinavian-influenced Fjord collection, which Italian furniture manufacturer Moroso launched in 2002, the year after she set up her own studio in Milan.
In this living room of a minimalist Chicago home designed by Randall Architects, the Fjord chair and stools form a grouping with the Tufty-Time modular sofa, a 2005 piece from Urquiola for Italy’s B&B Italia.
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Joy Flanagan Design
Starck Chairs
Louis Ghost. Perhaps the best-known chair with historical allusions is the Louis Ghost armchair by Philippe Starck, France’s rock star of design, for Kartell, Italy’s doyen of plastics. Starck has designed commercial buildings, residential towers and electric vehicles. He has decorated nightclubs, hotels, palaces and Steve Jobs’ yacht. And he has created thousands of products.
An earlier Starck chair for Kartell, the La Marie side chair, was revolutionary in that it was molded from a single piece of crystal-clear polycarbonate. With the Louis Ghost armchair, he blended that modern material and manufacturing technique with an 18th-century shape from the reign of Louis XV. The combination makes it a highly versatile chair that works in commercial, domestic, contemporary, traditional and — thanks to its transparency and lack of joints — small and outdoor spaces. The Victoria Ghost side chair and One More bar and counter stools followed.
These Louis Ghost armchairs, in a London townhouse designed by Joy Flanagan, transmit light from the yard, which helps compensate for the fact that the dining area, newly opened to the seating area, doesn’t have its own window. Walls painted in a green-tinged off-white (’s James White) complement the soft green of the furnishings and connect with the outdoors.
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Fanny Zigdon Interiors
Mademoiselle. For those wanting something cushier, there’s also Starck’s Mademoiselle chair, whose foam cushions are covered in fabrics by Moschino or Missoni, as seen in this model townhouse living room from Baltimore interior designer Fanny Zigdon.
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Chris Dorsey Architects, Inc
Masters. For his Masters chair, Starck paid homage to modernists Jacobsen, Eero Saarinen, and Ray and Charles Eames by weaving together the backrest outlines of their respective Series 7, Tulip and molded shell chairs into a now-familiar backrest of his own.
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Dangermond Keane
Three generations of a family — grandmother, mother and daughter — pull up these Masters chairs to a custom fir table by David Bertman Designs in the former headquarters of Eoff Electric Supply in Portland, Oregon. The mother bought the unit below the family’s existing two-level condo in the converted City Lofts building and asked Dangermond Keane Architecture to create bedrooms in it for the grandmother and daughter and to connect it to the levels above. The 10-by-12-foot room-within-a-room puts the grandmother in the heart of the action but can be closed off when she wants privacy. Around it are an office-library, the daughter’s bedroom, a living-dining-cooking area, a bathroom and an elevator. Topping it is the daughter’s playroom. The flexible design allows this unit to serve as a stand-alone apartment should the family’s needs change.
Read more about this multigenerational home and see the layout
Adrienne DeRosa
Dear Ingo Chandelier
In another adaptive-reuse project, Pittsburgh design store owner Stacy Weiss and her husband, contractor Will Carpenter, turned what had been a mechanic’s garage in the 1920s into their industrial-style, open-concept, one-level forever home. The couple had steel-framed, double-paned windows and doors made to echo the original ceiling’s steel beams. They had the white oak of the herringbone-patterned floor distressed to look old and then simply oiled it. They repurposed an antique apothecary cabinet for the kitchen island, which at 12-plus feet long provides much-needed storage in the warehouse-like space.
Overhead is the Dear Ingo chandelier — 16 articulated task lamps made of white or black powder-coated steel connected to a central ring. Israeli designer Ron Gilad created it for Moooi in 2003 and named it in homage to German lighting designer Ingo Maurer. With its ability to stretch its arms from 31½ to 94½ inches, Dear Ingo can adapt to many kinds of spaces.
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Nia Morris Studio
Ptolomeo Bookcase
Nia Morris, co-founder of interior design firm Cloud Studios, reconfigured this 1,075-square-foot London loft, once part of a Pirelli tire factory, into a bright and comfortable apartment for her family. She kept an open central living area and situated the two bedrooms on the perimeter. She also retained industrial features, such as the concrete ceiling and various pillars and beams. Two Ptolomeo bookcases store plenty of reading material in a small footprint on both sides of the beam that divides the living, dining and kitchen area on the right from Morris’ office area on the left.
Italian designer Bruno Rainaldi created the freestanding metal book tower for Opinion Ciatti in 2003. Named after Ptolemy I Soter, who helped establish the Library of Alexandria in ancient Egypt, the unobtrusive piece today comes in several heights and finishes. Even after Rainaldi’s death in 2011, the Italian firm expanded the collection to include, for example, Ptolomeo Luce, with an integrated LED light.
Read more about this London loft
chadbourne + doss architects
Chair One
A translucent LED wall illuminates this stairwell in a three-story home that Seattle’s Chadbourne + Doss Architects designed for a couple and their 18 bicycles. The new urban infill construction has a garage, guest room and bike shop on the ground level; public living areas on the middle level; and a top-floor master suite and deck, which take advantage of mountain and lake views.
Low-maintenance materials (fiber cement siding, stainless steel counters, Milestone acrylic cement wet-room walls) are meant to give the active couple plenty of time for their outdoor pursuits. Industrial-chic furnishings — such as the skeletal Chair One on this landing — let them relax indoors in high style.
Initially known for his pared-down designs, German designer Konstantin Grcic decided to explore more complex forms when Italian furniture brand Magis in 2002 asked him to create a chair in die-cast aluminum. As Puts did with the Raimond light, Grcic combined triangles to form Chair One’s curves in the seat and back. The collection consists of chairs (stacking four-leg, star-leg and concrete pedestal) and three-leg bar and counter stools. If Grcic ever realizes his dream of designing a bicycle, he could have a couple of takers in these homeowners.
Read more about this modern Seattle home
DHD Architecture and Interior Design
Body Raft
Living in a Manhattan loft with bedrooms radiating from a large common area was working well for New Zealand-born architect David Howell and his wife, interior designer Steffani Aarons, until their two daughters got older and everyone wanted more separation between public and private spaces. So Howell found a single-story 1920s manufacturing building within walking distance of the girls’ school and, along with several partners, developed it into a seven-story condo building. His family’s unit takes up the second floor.
Of all their furniture, Howell told Houzz, the Body Raft lounge chair, by New Zealand transplant David Trubridge, is the most comfortable. The bentwood rocking chaise looks out to the patio from the living room, which Aarons dressed neutrally in white oak wall paneling, oak floors stained deep brown and walls painted in Benjamin Moore’s Vanilla Milkshake. A socializing area by the fireplace includes a lacquered charcoal BDDW coffee table and a pair of chairs by American designer Milo Baughman that are covered in a Kelly Wearstler animal print.
Trubridge got a degree in naval architecture in England and then taught himself furniture making while working as a forester on a rural estate. In 1981, he and his wife sold almost everything they had and, with their two sons, set off in their yacht to see the world, settling in New Zealand five years later.
Trubridge imbued his canoe-like Body Raft with his personal experiences and love of nature. He exhibited it at the 2001 Milan Furniture Fair, where it was picked up for manufacture by Italy’s Cappellini and brought him international fame.
Dyna Builders
Coral Pendant Light
Trubridge keeps the environment top of mind in his designs: “I work within the limits of what I have and know, simplicity and low impact, natural materials and processes, leaving a delicate footprint,” he has said. He based his subsequent Coral pendant light — another spherical polyhedron — on coral growth patterns and created it so that its sustainably harvested bamboo plywood components, cut on CNC (computer numerically controlled) machines, could be flat-packed and assembled by the consumer with nylon clips. This work helped him earn an Antarctica Arts Fellowship, which deepened his connection to and stewardship of our fragile planet.
A Coral pendant and tongue-and-groove fir paneling lend warmth to this 1,200-square-foot Seattle floating home, built by Ninebark Design Build and Dyna Contracting for an eco-conscious woman who wanted it to be open, modern and industrial-looking. The flooring is concrete-effect Marmoleum linoleum by Forbo. The countertops are Squak Mountain Stone, a soapstone-like material composed of recycled paper, recycled glass, fly ash and low-carbon cement. It was conceived by Washington entrepreneur Ameé Quiriconi as a graduate school assignment in which she was asked to develop a material that could be manufactured anywhere, and sales of it began in 2005.
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The Pink House
London Toile Wallpaper
Scottish textile and wallpaper manufacturer Timorous Beasties draws on nature too: Glasgow School of Art alums Alistair McAuley and Paul Simmons launched the firm, which takes its name from Robert Burns’ poem To a Mouse, in 1990 with hand-printed iguana, thistle and bee motifs. But it was their edgy Glasgow Toile of 2004 that really got people’s attention.
Riffing on 18th-century French toile de Jouy, McAuley and Simmons replaced the typically pastoral scenes of leisurely pursuits with gritty contemporary images from the city they know and love. In the shadow of landmarks such as Mackintosh Church and the University of Glasgow’s bell tower, a junkie shoots up, a tramp takes a swig and a scamp relieves himself on a tree.
Edinburgh interiors blogger Emily Murray used Timorous Beasties’ follow-up London Toile wallpaper and Louis Ghost chairs in her dining room as a way to modernize her Victorian without losing its character. Featuring Tower Bridge and the London Eye, as well as vagrants and muggers, the wallpaper is also a reminder of the city she moved from.
Read more about this colorful Edinburgh Victorian
Designtrappan Nordic AB
Lace Fence
Dutch designer Joep Verhoeven referenced the Netherlands’ lace-making heritage with his Design Academy Eindhoven graduation project: Lace Fence, utilitarian chain-link fencing woven with decorative patterns that’s seen here on display at the Design Center at Philadelphia University. Two types of wire (bent or welded), multiple finish choices, three kinds of mesh base and a wealth of motifs that can be combined and sized as desired add up to one-of-a-kind constructions with many applications.
Victoria Villeneuve
Photo from the Brooklyn Museum, Marie Bernice Bitzer Fund
Not to be outdone, Verhoeven’s identical twin brother, Jeroen, availed himself both of historical archives and the latest computer-aided design and manufacturing technology to create this Cinderella table. He virtually merged simplified profiles of two tables — one each from the 17th and 18th centuries, which he regards as the pinnacle of Dutch furniture craftsmanship — into a three-dimensional form and used CNC machines to cut the form into 57 slices (741 layers of plywood), which he then glued together and finished by hand.
The brothers and classmate Judith de Graauw founded the design collective De Makers Van (The Makers Of) in 2005.
David Matero Architecture
Midsummer Pendant Light
Fellow Dutchman and Eindhoven student Tord Boontje says the birth of his daughter brought forth the romantic decorative style evident in his 2004 Midsummer pendant light, made by Los Angeles design firm Artecnica. It’s composed of two sheets of tear-, heat- and water-resistant Tyvek (the synthetic paper used for shipping envelopes) that are intricately cut into flowers and foliage. They’re draped as desired over a bulb-shielding plastic cone for a unique look.
The delicate Midsummer pendant gives a dreamy feel to this sleeping loft, which is in a 350-square-foot outbuilding designed by architect David Matero to nestle in the woods on the Maine coast and connect via a rope bridge and zip line to the main house.
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Irvin Serrano
Until Dawn Curtain Panel
This bedroom, in a Maine home by Stewart Brecher Architects, features Boontje’s related Until Dawn curtain panels. The panel is formed like a paper snowflake: A Tyvek sheet is folded into quarters, stamped with a die-cutting machine and unfolded to reveal silhouettes of flora and fauna in mirrored symmetry — a deer reflected in a lake, a bird singing to its mate. The panel casts intriguing shadows when hung from its Velcro-closure loops and holes on a pole, a wire or hooks. The 3½-by-8-foot panel can be cut to fit.
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Fannie Allen Design
M’Afrique Furniture
Boontje has said that the work of his London studio “draws from a belief that modernism does not mean minimalism, that contemporary does not forsake tradition and that technology does not abandon people and senses.” His fanciful Shadowy chair evokes North Sea beach furniture of the 1920s. Following digitally drawn color patterns, Senegalese artisans weave plastic twine usually used for fishnets around the steel frame. The chair is part of Moroso’s M’Afrique furniture collection, which debuted at the 2009 Milan Furniture Fair and sparked interest in tribal design.
In the backyard of a San Francisco Bay Area ranch home by interior designer Fannie Allen, Shadowy chairs flank a gas fire pit to the left of a stainless steel soaking tub.
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Fannie Allen Design
Nearby is a pizza oven, a second fire pit and more seating from the M’Afrique collection: two painted Car-Rapide rockers and two woven Toogou chairs, all by Senegalese-French designer Bibi Seck and Turkish-born Ayse Birsel, who are New York-based partners in marriage and work.
Margot Hartford Photography
Dixon Lighting
Beat. British designer Tom Dixon’s Beat lighting collection resulted from a 2002 cultural initiative to help metalsmiths in India — where plastic was supplanting the brass and copper traditionally used for water vessels — find another outlet for their skills. The handmade lights’ strong silhouettes and pleasing proportions echo the original vessels. Each is spun and welded. Then the interior is hammered to scatter light, while the exterior is skimmed smooth on a lathe and lacquered.
The Beat collection includes floor, table and wall lights plus six pendant shapes, including the Fat, Tall and Wide ones suspended over this BoConcept dining table in an open-plan home in the Netherlands.
Read more about this family house designed for play
R Brant Design
Mirror Ball. Hovering over this custom walnut-and-bronze dining table, in an early 1900s New Mexico home renovated by R Brant Design, are Dixon’s Mirror Ball pendants in all three sizes. Soon after launching his company in 2002, Dixon set out to create a simple reflective light that would disappear into the background. He admits that he didn’t succeed. The Mirror Ball is so shiny that it’s hard to take the eye off the molded transparent plastic sphere, whose interior is coated with a thin layer of vaporized silver or gold metal. It’s available singly and in clusters as pendant lights or floor lamps.
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Hollub Homes
Cloud Bookcase
The mix-and-match nature of Dixon’s pendants invites consumers into the design process — something that French brothers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec actively encourage with their designs. For example, their eight-compartment white polyethylene Cloud bookcases, introduced by Cappellini in 2004, can be connected as desired to create a honeycomb-like structure.
These two Cloud bookcases (each 41 by 73¾ by 17¼ inches) in a teen girl’s bedroom in a Miami residence renovated by Hollub Homes, are against a wall, but they could be placed in a freestanding arrangement to act as a room divider. Pierre Paulin’s Pumpkin chairs and a rug by London designer Sonya Winner provide splashes of vibrant color.
Read more about the Bouroullecs’ innovative ‘microarchitecture’
ERA architecture
Algue System
The Bouroullecs’ textural Algue (Seaweed) system, also from 2004, can take even more forms: indoor-outdoor room divider, curtain, screen, canopy. Architect Ericka Ramirez utilized it as a lacy wall sculpture atop Tiles wallpaper from PaperMint in this bedroom in her Paris apartment.
Swiss brand Vitra makes the plastic pieces in five colors, each sold in packages of 25. They snap together at any of multiple points, can be layered for varying densities and multihued effects and can be disassembled and rearranged. Algue’s open-endedness feeds a new millennium’s appetite for flexibility and individuality in design.
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