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Shop the look Shop the look @Chris Soderberg We love our new Warren Coffee table in our office's lounge!Shop the look Shop the look @Jack Absolutely love my new chairs , great quality and designShop the lookTHE furnishings are recognizable, even to those with only a passing knowledge of modern design: Le Corbusier's chrome and leather armchair, Mies van der Rohe's stainless steel and glass Barcelona table, the odd Italian lamp and the right accessory - a Peruvian textile fragment, an antique kilim, mohair pillows, an Alvar Aalto vase filled with daisies, an African mask. This look, a spinoff of the International Style, which was at its height in the 1920's and 30's, has become a modern classic. It can be cool and corporate. But two apartments squarely in the style, one in New York, the other in Chicago, look surprisingly up-to-date and refreshingly simple, despite their studied geometric layouts and a certain formality. And they avoid looking like banks or apartment house lobbies, where reproductions of the designs have become set pieces.
On Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, Robert Kleinschmidt's apartment is all Mies van der Rohe. In Manhattan, Nancy Hertzfeld has combined Le Corbusier with contemporary Italian, without losing the Bauhaus touch. Mr. Kleinschmidt and Ms. Hertzfeld, both architects, began collecting their furniture some years ago when the pieces were synonymous with contemporary design - ''modern classics in their own right,'' as Stuart Wrede, director of the department of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, put it. ''They're very strong right now,'' said Samuel Friedman, the president of International Contract Furnishings, which has been importing modern classics under license since 1962. ''With post-modernism there was all this hunger to search around for something else, but now it's more, 'Gee, what we need has been right under our noses all this time.' These classics appeal most to people who, in their 20's, found them strikingly modern but perhaps could not afford them.
Now the typical buyer is ''a business professional, a man or woman between the ages of 35 and 55, college-educated and upwardly mobile,'' said Stephen Kiviat, president of Atelier International, which has pioneered reproductions of works by Le Corbusier, Gerrit Rietveld and Charles Rennie Mackintosh for 20 years. An avalanche of later copies, generally lower-priced and of lesser quality, has also been a major factor in popularizing the designs. Le Corbusier's cube chair, once somewhat forbidding, now seems as friendly as an easy chair to many people. This comes as no surprise to people like Ms. Hertzfeld, who is so at home with her furniture that she can say, ''Classic can even be a bit staid.'' Nevertheless, her apartment in a prewar building on the Upper East Side is not, especially the living room, with its 13-foot ceiling. At the University of Pennsylvania, Ms. Hertzfeld studied under Louis Kahn and was influenced by, as she put it, ''the discipline of the Bauhaus.'' ''To depend on ornamentation to express space and scale was a no-no,'' she said.
''The strong influence and discipline of the Bauhaus led me to try always to express the structure of a space.'' For Ms. Hertzfeld that meant keeping her apartment uncluttered, with the half-dozen pieces of furniture in right-angled groupings. The series of six Andy Warhol portraits of Marilyn Monroe above the fireplace makes a vivid contrast to the black, white and beige color scheme. The light-filled apartment with its glossy white walls, bleached floors, and concealed hardware and lighting sets off a collection of modern furniture Ms. Hertzfeld has accumulated over 18 years at warehouse sales rather than auction houses and antiques shops. ''I bought things at good prices when I could find them,'' she said. One of her prizes is the Mies van der Rohe daybed from Knoll International that she bought for $325 in 1971. ''I have some very contemporary things I've thrown in once I had the basic pieces. People don't need to stuff their rooms with a lot of furniture.'' ''When Mies was alive,'' she added, ''he had Oriental rugs.
His home in Chicago was sparse but not boring, and minimal but comfortable.'' When she renovated the apartment recently, Ms. Hertzfeld put a long, low slot in a living room wall so the dining room a few steps below has natural light. Chairs by Marcel Breuer surround the dining table. ''These are the things that are natural to me,'' Ms. Hertzfeld said. Leaving a room unchanged is very much part of the modern-classic esthetic. ''I haven't moved anything in 16 1/2 years,'' Mr. Kleinschmidt said of his apartment. Mr. Kleinschmidt, a partner in Powell/Kleinschmidt, a Chicago architectural firm, has the inspiration for his decor all around him. He lives in a 1949 Mies van der Rohe apartment building overlooking Lake Michigan. His 800-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment is furnished almost exclusively with the German architect's designs. ''No fancy moldings, but a cleansing of the soul,'' Mr. Kleinschmidt said. He conceded that it was not easy to live up to the apartment's underlying philosophy - orderly, flexible spaces that take advantage of the light.
As Mr. Kleinschmidt put it, ''It means, first of all, being neat.'' The apartment is small and the pieces must stand out. Some of his solutions were purely functional: the library table, for example, doubles as a dining table, and a couch from a 1931 Mies design has been adapted to make a double bed. Looking for ways to make the interior more personal, Mr. Kleinschmidt adopted what he called seasonal schemes. ''I change the accessories several times a year because I don't like everything out at once,'' he said. In spring and summer there is a reed carpet on the the living room floor, the Barcelona chairs are upholstered in tan calf and the sofa is slipcovered in linen. In winter a wool ribbed carpet is substituted, the slipcover is taken off the suede sofa and the Barcelona chairs appear in dark brown calf. It turns out that Mr. Kleinschmidt has two pairs of chairs and rotates them. Because Mr. Kleinschmidt planned his apartment carefully when he first moved into it, he is as pleased today with the way it functions as he was nearly 17 years ago.