Objects · people · ideas
Discover the objects, people and ideas that shaped furniture, from historic pieces to modern designs.
Aalto’s tea trolleys let a serving surface travel to the person who needs it. Large wheels and curved birch frames turn that movement into the design’s main feature, while trays, shelves and baskets give different versions their own ways of carrying things.
See how Eileen Gray turned an incomplete circle, two telescopic uprights and a small pin on a chain into a table that approaches a bed instead of waiting beyond reach.
Untangle Hans J. Wegner’s 1958 Airport Chair history: CH401, A.P. Stolen, later makers, Kastrup use and the limits of resemblance.
Alma Siedhoff-Buscher gave a cupboard removable seats and an opening for puppet theatre. Her Haus Am Horn design made room for children to change the furniture’s use.
An Anglepoise 1227 makes a small mechanical performance out of moving a desk lamp. Pull the shade towards the work and the arms change position; the springs are there to help the lamp stay where it is put.
See how Arne Jacobsen's 1952 Ant Chair turned a canteen brief, one double-curved plywood shell and three legs into an economy of space and material.
A round wooden seat and three legs seem almost too simple to carry much history. Turn Stool 60 over in your mind, though, and its most important feature appears: each leg bends beneath the seat to make the connection.
Tolomeo looks light partly because so much of its balancing system is drawn in thin lines. Aluminium arms carry the shade, while fine steel cables connect their movement to springs hidden within the structure.
Open one documented David Roentgen cabinet: a 3.59-metre machine of marquetry, clockwork, music, hidden compartments and royal performance.
A deep drawer hides things in layers. A Bisley MultiDrawer gives those layers separate handles. Its quiet usefulness grew from office paperwork, but the same idea makes sense wherever small objects accumulate.
Blue paint changes the familiar picture of Shaker furniture. Examine a pine blanket chest with a deep drawer and a surviving history of painted surfaces.
Look closely at Met cabinet 59.108: a towering object from about 1700 whose marquetry, bronze mounts and hidden substitutions reveal how spectacle and workshop economy worked together.
A late-sixteenth-century Japanese export cabinet combines lacquer and mother-of-pearl with a European fall-front writing form. Compare its open and closed faces.
An English embroidered cabinet hides writing storage and a mirrored interior behind raised needlework. Follow its Esther scene and the question of unnamed makers.
Follow Campeche Chair 2000.451 from its fixed crossed frame and flower-basket crest through port trade, contested attribution, later copies and long domestic use.
Conservation revealed a dated inscription beneath Charles-Honoré Lannuier’s card table. Follow the rotating top, hidden signature and sculptural support.
A gilded Florentine marriage chest carries a procession across its front. Explore wedding imagery, household storage and the later lid of this cassone.
Why Marcel Breuer's Cesca chair combines a springing tubular-steel frame with wood and cane, and how its 1928 design relates to later production.
See how Hans J. Wegner's 1963 CH07 Shell Chair uses two curved wooden shells, deliberate gaps and three legs to make support appear almost weightless.
Read the CH24 Wishbone Chair through its dates, curved frame, Y-shaped support, joinery and paper-cord seat—then separate model history from vintage-object evidence.
See how Hans J. Wegner’s 1952 CH29 turned the splayed support of a carpenter’s sawbuck into a wide, curved and unexpectedly sociable dining chair.
A pale decorated frame surrounds a fine woven seat. The Met’s eighteenth-century chair combines fruitwood, ivory and cane, using solid edges and open surfaces to give an intricately worked object a surprisingly light outline.
Bedframe supports, castors and a writing board changed Darwin’s armchair. Its patched arms and his son’s memories reveal a working arrangement shaped around one person.
Understand how Charlotte Perriand connected furniture with everyday and collective living through one documented 1952 commission produced with Ateliers Jean Prouvé.