The intellectual property depicted in this model, including the brand "knoll furniture", is not affiliated with or endorsed by the original rights holders. Don't see the file format you need? Free File Format Conversion Bob brings unique expertise to the furniture industry having began his career at Knoll before founding CFI in 1985. His passion and “be fair” philosophy has lead CFI to become the sole distributor of Knoll furniture in the region. Bob’s affinity for great design and a good story has resulted in an impressive collection of curiosities. Ask him about the rooster he got from Michael Jackson’s kitchen. Jan brings over 25 years of industry experience to CFI. Her career highlights include dealer and manufacturer sales rep as well as a consultant and designer. Her range of industry knowledge helps provide insight to CFI’s management team. As the Creative Director for all of the CFI facilities and showrooms, Jan is the best representative for the “bring life to work” motto.
Recently, she brought that passion for great design to the Delaware location and transformed white walls and bare space into a museum-like atmosphere that showcases CFI's many furniture selections. Vice President of Operations and Owner Amanda is Owner of CFI New Jersey and Principal of both CFI New Jersey and CFI Pennsylvania. Her approach to providing clients with excellent services is all about teamwork and clear communication. Her background in business and hospitality bring a unique synergy to the client experience from planning to execution. As President of CFI, Patte brings an acute level of focus and commitment to the highest degree of integrity and ethics. She continues to build a cohesive workplace environment where all can work hard, play hard and share in the rewards of their community efforts. Patte particularly enjoys her unofficial role of chief docent as she entertains visitors with long forgotten details CFI’s historical property. Vice President of Sales
For over 15 years, Mike has learned the ins and outs of the furniture industry by immersing himself in the details. He believes the key to client satisfaction relies heavily on the ability to listen. Mike believes full heartedly in the natural approach to business and life. You are who you are meant to be. Because of this love of nature, his dream is to hike the entire Appalachian Trail and to be a member of the Polar Bear Club for 25 years straight. He is on year 13, so ask him if you can join him for the next one! Beverley has worked in the furniture industry for over 30 years. At her previous role at Knoll, she held various positions in manufacturing, customer service, project management, textiles and sales. In 2005, she joined CFI in Lehigh Valley and is committed to consistently growing the market during a challenging economy. Through her strong work ethic and dedication, she leads the CFI team toward a future of success. Beverley enjoys reading, hiking, traveling and spending time with friends and family.
"Smile and everyone will wonder what you are up too!" Director of Strategic Business Development As the Director of Strategic Business Development, Matt's main focus is to develop and expand CFI's offerings locally and nationally. He brings extensive market knowledge and insight from his previous position as a broker with Jones Lang LaSalle. Manager of Client Services A former Managing Partner of a Knoll dealership, Mike brings over 30 years of relevant experience to CFI. His extensive background in business management includes ownership, customer service, sales and operations. He is dedicated to the further development of CFI's client services division. Mike believes strongly in striving for new successes everyday. He works and lives by the motto: “Celebrate what you accomplished today but understand that it starts all over tomorrow”. George joined CFI in 2006 as Controller, having gained vast experience in accounting and operations management in varying industries.
His experience in working with large and small companies has given him the tools for dealing with the accounting, operations and human resources management on a day-to-day basis. He has a B.A. in accounting from Lycoming College and an M.B.A. from Lebanon Valley College. As Vice President of boomerang, Josh manages the daily operations, business development and marketing needs. His background experience in sales as well as management combined with a passion for office furniture has helped elevate boomerang as the pre-eminent specialist in high quality, pre-owned office furniture. Josh works hard to keep the A&D community engaged. Hosting a successful annual paintball event for partners and vendors, Josh has proven on numerous occasions that his innovative ideas and creative approach helps to push boomerang for even more success.“The modern chair, which most people find too advanced today, is what they’ll like to sit in 10 years from now,” Florence Knoll said in 1953. If you don’t know Ms. Knoll’s name, you have undoubtedly sat on her low, chrome-foot chairs: she created the look of U.S. embassies, corporations and college dormitories during the 1940s and ’50s.
Ms. Knoll’s imagination gave us both the Cold War diplomat’s office and the Mad Men executive suite. Born in Michigan in 1917, Ms. Knoll (née Schust) attended Cranbrook, the storied art school outside of Detroit, where she was a classmate of Charles and Ray Eames and Eero Saarinen. She was steered to fashion because she was a woman; she steered herself back to architecture, interning in 1939 with Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer and then briefly studying with Mies van der Rohe in Chicago. This exhibition, curated by Earl Martin, Paul Makovsky, Angela Völker and Susan Ward, focuses on the Knoll firm’s use of textiles, Ms. Knoll’s specialty and a small and tactile entry point into the feel of American postwar industrial and political expansion. Her first and only boss, Hans Knoll, a German emigré from a furniture-making family, hired Florence Schust in 1943 to design interiors for his new modern furniture company. Their inaugural commission was the secretary of war’s office in the newly built Pentagon.
Ms. Knoll remembers those early years as tough: “Everything was difficult. Even the glues were inferior glues. Everything was on a wartime basis. We had to use ingenuity to get anything produced at all.” Wooden benches and chairs designed by Jens Risom needed upholstery and Ms. Knoll found an ingenious wartime solution: she caned them with army parachute straps. The 1.5-inch-wide, olive-and-red ribbons distributed weight well and matched the stripped-down utilitarian look of the chairs. Ms. Knoll’s 652W Lounge Chair With Arms (1943) is the first of many innovations that became synonymous with American resourcefulness. Hans Knoll married Florence Schust in 1946. Although a Life magazine article from the 1950s spins their romance as though she were a secretary made good (“Florence Knoll, 35, who has done many Knoll pieces, came to work for Knoll as a designer, after two years married the boss”), Florence was an equal partner. She covered Hans’s early business gaffs with $50,000 from her trust fund, providing necessary capital during the firm’s expansion.
Her modernist ideas about pattern and color created a signature look. She invited former Cranbrook classmates to design chairs, which Knoll manufactured and sold on license. They found hits with the Saarinen Womb Chair (1946) and Executive Armless Chair (1946). They opened showrooms on East 65th Street and then Madison Avenue; open spaces with great blocks of primary colors and groupings of geometric tables, couches and chairs. They branded their furniture “Equipment for Living.” Ms. Knoll’s talent was in taking unconventional textiles used by an industry and repurposing them as interiors. It was brilliant design homeopathy. She used the flannels and tweeds from men’s suit fabrics as upholstery on the firm’s executive chairs. The sturdy weaves and subtle textures complemented the 1940s office. With limitations on traditional fibers, Ms. Knoll turned to synthetics developed for military use, like Saran, made by Dow Chemical, or DuPont’s Orlon acrylic. She turned army material technology into defense office interiors.
You already know the feel of these fabrics. Here, the show becomes Proustian, materials evoking cultural memories. These textiles are the wipeable stuff of school cafeteria walls, the ridged caning of lightweight, movable chairs in college dormitory common spaces, the nubby chenille pile of the American corporate carpet. As the firm grew, Ms. Knoll turned to designers for new fabrics. Marianne Strengell created thick, Chanel-like tweeds. Toni Prestini conjured a cotton plain weave staple that the company produced continually from 1948 to 1982. These fabrics were technical triumphs: in Prestini, a ratiné weft alternates with a two-ply cotton/rayon warp to create illusionistic tone-on-tone dots. The company got a colorist when it hired Eszter Haraszty in 1949. Haraszty reissued 1940s prints in bolder palettes and nailed the Knoll “look” of the 1950s and ’60s: a red-orange color, an unworried mixing of plastic, chrome, nylon and wool, tone-on-tone on white. Her “Lana” persimmon fabric on the Model 31 chair designed by Ms. Knoll (1956) is exemplary.
In the press, Knoll’s uses of industrial materials were seen as representative of American ingenuity and talent. Knoll didn’t just sell chairs—it conjured the American postwar dream to live in a new and better world. No wonder the firm was chosen to design the interiors of the American consulates in Stockholm, Havana, Copenhagen and Brussels, IBM, General Motors, the North American Life and Causality Co. and the CBS building. Their Marcel Breuer coffee tables and Saarinen Executive armchairs became as ubiquitous as gray flannel suits. After Hans Knoll died in 1955, the company went on without a misstep until Florence Knoll retired in 1965. But afterward, despite the exhibition’s cheerleading, it seems lost. It was sold and changed names three times, and drifted away from the minimalist look and design innovation that had made its name. Knoll is still having its effect on American identity and industry. Modernist furniture, glimpsed through New York’s condo windows, displays the ubiquitous horizontal silhouettes of Knoll’s Barcelona chairs and Ms. Knoll’s sofas.
The graphic design of Google’s home page echoes Knoll’s cheerful modular look: the white space around the search box might be the friendly plastic of a Tulip Chair. A small exhibition of seven Cy Twombly sculptures installed at MoMA takes on new significance in light of the artist’s death last week. Produced quietly during the length of Mr. Twombly’s career, the sculptures span the half-century from 1954 to 2005 like white shadows of his more famous paintings. Like the work of his peers, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, Mr. Twombly’s sculptures reveal neo-Dada tastes in found materials. Untitled (Funerary Box for a Lime Green Python) (1954) is assembled of wood, palm leaf fans, cloth and wire. Untitled (1976) is a telescopelike tube of cardboard. All are white—some are covered in white house paint, others by plaster—yet often vibrant glimpses of materials show through the surfaces, and their parenthetic titles evoke color. The Virginia-born Mr. Twombly called white paint his marble, referencing his chosen home of Italy;