This mid-twentieth century shopping bag celebrates an icon of Danish Modern furniture design. The bag, created in 1949 by Mike Romer and Ida Fabricius, is embellished with a boldly rendered illustration of the Chieftain chair (Høvdingestolen), designed in that same year by Danish architect and furniture designer Finn Juhl. With its dramatically curved leather upholstery...

  This 1905 furniture trade catalog in the  Cooper Hewitt Design Library  is from the renowned Japanese art and antiques firm of Yamanaka & Co. Covered in silk brocade and bound with silk threads according to the ancient Japanese bookbinding technique of Yotsume Toji or stab-binding, it contains 36 photographic plates of elaborately carved, gilded,...

This post was originally published on October 9th, 2014. An opulent bed, almost completely dominated by its hangings, pushes at the edges of the border in this etching by the French designer and architect, Daniel Marot. This design is for a state bed (lit d’apparat), a bed that was purely ceremonial rather than functional, and...

Authors: Stephen Van Dyk and Adrienne Meyer This early 20th century trade catalog in the Cooper Hewitt Library includes furniture, lighting, and decorative objects in the art nouveau style created by the French firm of Majorelle. Louis Majorelle (1859-1926), an important French furniture manufacturer, took over his father Auguste’s cabinet making workshop in Nancy in...

Small Sofa for Count Bielenski, Grand Marshal of Poland is a print on white laid paper, etched and engraved by Gabriel Huquier (French, 1695-1772). It features a sofa or canapé designed in the Rococo style, framed by an interior wall decorated with carvings that mirror the graceful curvatures of the sofa’s structure. The goldsmith, sculptor,...

In celebration of World Pride, June Object of the Day posts highlight LGBTQ+ designers and design in the collection. Best known today for his graphic design, Dan Friedman was also an educator and writer who tirelessly explored and experimented in many other design disciplines. In the late 1960s, Friedman studied graphic design in Germany and...

In 1877, commercial designer and architect Edward William Godwin collaborated with furniture manufacturer William Watt to produce this trade catalogue held in the Cooper Hewitt Library. Godwin was considered the most innovative designer of the Aesthetic Movement. A brief but pivotal moment in the history of the decorative arts, Aestheticism strove to bring art into...

This 1937 Czech tubular steel trade catalog Kovový nábytek //Vichr a Spol  is a recent addition to the Cooper Hewitt Library’s extensive collection of furniture trade literature. The library collects these invaluable primary resource materials from all periods, styles, designs and countries. This is a photogravure catalog issued by Vichr, one of the major Czech...

Gilt bronze furniture mounts have long been an element of decoration in French interiors. In addition to their use as ornament, they were highly functional. Their gilded surfaces added value and appeal to what would typically be a basic utilitarian purpose: protection for furniture. The mounts were generally fixed to the edges, corners, and feet...

This is a gilt bronze furniture mount made in France, in about 1800. Highly decorative mounts like this one were important elements in interior and furniture design from the late seventeenth to the early nineteenth centuries. They were created by master artisans trained in a strict guild system which applied exacting standards to the fabrication...

In a 1929 article for The Studio, Charlotte Perriand, the designer of this stool, wrote polemically about the advantages of using metal over wood, noting its utilitarian and aesthetic value. She said, “Metal plays the same part in furniture as cement has done in architecture. It is a Revolution.”[1] Her now-iconic B306 chaise longue made...

The celebrated American designer Wendell Castle was known as the "father of the art furniture movement."

The theme of this Royal Jewel Cabinet from France, dated 1824-26, is no doubt indulgence in all forms – especially love and extravagance. Its rich iconography displays symbols of love and jewels, where antiquity is mixed with early-nineteenth century depictions of flowers.[1] The cabinet is constructed of porcelain plaques in a gilt-bronze armature. A golden...

In the 1920s, the New York department store was an early promoter and exhibitor of European modernism and a distiller of these new styles for the American consumer. Good Furniture magazine reported in 1928 that “Lord and Taylor has taken a very definite step forward toward the actual placing of modern furniture in American homes.”[1]...

Join curator Sarah Coffin for a Facebook Live tour of The Jazz Age: American Style in the 1920s.