Items 1-24 of 154While searching for Modern Classic Furniture, you undoubtedly have encountered a wide gamut of offerings, from a variety of importers or distributors, all claiming to be the best. Consequently, you will hear words from various importers and distributors such as “Original”, “Knock-off” and “Reproductions”. In particular, some manufacturers speak about how they own the rights to a specific design and hold specific design patents for specific models. What should be made clear is that such manufacturers hold "trade name only" copyright for use towards a specific product design and/or have an agreement with a historical foundation to market under a specific name. They are not making an “original” production design under a technical manufacturing drawing at all; just their version of it with a “product name” copyright registration. There are a few exceptions, notably, Herman Miller and the Charles Eames iconic plywood arm chair. This item has been in continuous production at Herman Miller since it was designed in the 1950s and becuase of that, we don't make it, as it is not in the publis domain.
The Eames Lounger was not a design that was created for a specific exibition or trade show such as the Mies van der Rohe Spanish Pavilion Chair or the LC2 Chair created by Le Corbusier for the 1929 Paris Furniture Pavillion. Once these latter items were shown, they were abondoned for over 30 years. Here at Modern Classics Furniture, we are not just another website selling modern classic furniture reproductions - nor are we purchasing from a large network of contract manufacturers.We actually make the product. This is an important distinction. The Modern Classic furniture pieces that we offer today have reached a state of “Public Domain”. Most, if not all of these designs, may have held only limited and narrow product design patent claims with 12 – 25 year patent authority. In fact, most of these designs held no design patents at the time of their market introductions which includes most of the furniture designs conducted by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Eileen Gray and Marcel Breuer, for example.
All of the designs we offer have no current “technical manufacturing product design specific” registrations. This allows us to reproduce these items to the specifications of the original design, but not necessarily an exact replica due to current market expectations of comfort, environmental concerns, higher grades of raw materials and more modern manufacturing techniques. If we did produce some of the “original” designs to the original product blueprints from 45 – 80 years ago, we would be using mild steel tubing - perhaps spot-welded or bolted together, cushions stuffed of horsehairs and straw, etc. An actual “original” of any of the items that we produce would date back to the original production runs of the design, perhaps 80 years ago, and thus, are no longer in production from the original manufacturing factory today. To be clear, the “Originals” are near-priceless pieces of furniture found today in museums and exclusive private collections. Modern Classic Furniture specializes in manufacturing and selling only in the highest quality, best value reproductions in the market today.
We are not selling someone else's imported products, but our own manufactured pieces. Utilizing the expertise of master craftsmen, who join us from around the world, coupled with the best selection of raw materials sourced from around the world, we are able to bring you the best prices for high quality furniture craftsmanship you may find anywhere. To say our furniture models are “knock-offs” implies that someone else is making the “real ones” somewhere, which is, simply stated, not correct. We view our furniture models as setting a new, higher standard for Mid-Century Modern reproductions, but certainly not as a knock-offs. We are committed to duplicating the appearance, scale and function of the original designs of the Bauhaus / Modernist Classic Era as close as humanly possible. We take exacting measures to replicate the original design and use only the finest materials and craftspeople available. The end result is a high quality piece of furniture that equals or exceeds the manufacturing standards of the original.
We offer a value that is in keeping with the original designers with the intent of bringing high quality furniture to the consumer at a price that is reasonably accessible to most furnishing budgets.By the 1950s Danish architect Arne Jacobsen had already designed family homes and apartments, public buildings and recreation centres, laboratories and factories. He had undertaken one of his biggest projects yet, the design of the SAS House hotel and airline terminal for Scandinavian Airlines System (SAS) in Copenhagen for which he would design his much sort after and copied chairs such as the Egg, Swan and Syveren (Seven) series. Through the SAS House Jacobsen continued the Scandinavian tradition of designing custom furnishings for his large-scale buildings, continually developing new designs for lighting, textiles and seating. Throughout his career, he had always sought to create type-forms, elementary objects that could be adapted to a variety of locations. The Visor lamps (below) and the Seven series of chairs for the SAS House are two of the most notable.
Jacobsen constructed his first chair in 1925 while he was a student in architecture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and exhibited it the same year at the landmark Exposition des Art Décoratifs in Paris, where it was awarded a silver medal and provided Jacobsen with his first public recognition. What followed was a thirty-year-long exploration into the essential form of the chair. Before World War II, Jacobsen had worked with woodworkers and upholsters to produce variations on traditional types of seating but after 1950, craft was supplanted by technology when new industrial processes of bending and laminating materials contributed to the creation of radically new forms. The first was the Myren (Ant) chair, a stacking chair of laminated wood that had been developed for the lunch room of a pharmaceutical factory in 1951, however its design didn't accommodate the ability to have armrests. The Seven series chair, and the Ant chair which preceded it originated from Jacobsen's experimentations with wood laminate for his Swan chair, which eventually came to be moulded from styropore foam.
The curves of the Swan chair's armrests exceeded the laminated wood's structural capabilities. With the Seven, armrests were extended from the legs of the chair and made from the same bent steel tubing which had by then become the hallmark of modern design, especially through the work of Marcel Breuer. The Seven chair was equally useful with or without arms and could also be combined with a variety of supports, including a swivel base with wheels for offices and a fixed pedestal for lecture halls. All the wood elements of a chair would be combined into a single form, and the metal elements would be reduced to their minimum dimensions. Jacobsen was not a theorist and he never articulated a universal language of form as his design contemporaries did such as Dieter Rams and his principles of good design. Instead, he worked in an intuitive manner, approaching each project, regardless of scale or material, as an opportunity to fuse his refined aesthetic with a specific function and new methods of construction as with the Seven series chair.