While all but gone today, Jamestown's furniture industry was once the second-largest producer of furniture in the United States. Manufacturing boomed from 1816, when William Breed and Royal Keyes opened their shops, to the 1920s, when Jamestown was still one of the top wood furniture producers in the country. In the nineteenth century, the thriving railroad industry allowed Jamestown's quality creations to be distributed nationwide. After the Civil War, an influx of Swedish immigrants brought their craftsmanship and skills to Jamestown, forming Morgan Manufacturing, Empire Furniture Company and many others. Then, their pieces were valued for quality and durability; today, they're coveted by collectors as beautiful antiques. Local expert Clarence Carlson uncovers the fascinating story of Jamestown furniture.

Charlotte Perriand was one of great designers of the twentieth century. A pioneer of modernism, her work was often overshadowed by her more famous male collaborators, who included Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret and Jean Prouve. However, in recent years her reputation as a furniture designer and architect has matched the stature of her peers - her furniture in particular has become highly prized by collectors. From the 1920s onwards, Perriand was instrumental in bringing the modernist aesthetic to interiors. But she also believed in the synthesis of the arts, and was friends with visual artists such as Pablo Picasso and Fernand Leger. This book will explore Perriand's journey from the machine aesthetic to her adoption of natural forms, and from modular furniture systems to major architectural projects such as Les Arcs ski resort. Featuring some of her most famous interiors, as well as her original furniture, her photography and her personal notebooks, this book sheds new light on Perriand's creative process and her place in design history. It will accompany the forthcoming Design Museum exhibition of the same title, which will coincide with the twenty-fifth anniversary of Perriand's last significant presentation in London, held at the Design Museum in 1996.

The ultimate collector's resource, including hundreds of pieces by both well- and lesser-known designers from around the world. From armchairs and chaises longues to cabinets and nightstands, the period between the late 1930s and early 1970s was one of the most productive, inventive and exciting eras for objects and furniture in the home. Post-war optimism combined with new manufacturing methods and material techniques to create an explosion of new design and objects of desire. The appetite for mid-century modern remains as strong as ever, both for classic designs - many still in production since they were launched - and for rare, hard-to- find or out-of-production pieces from lesser-known designers. While numerous books surveying mid-century modern style have appeared over the years, no publication has been specifically conceived for the increasing collector's market in mid-century modern design, focusing on each piece of furniture as an object of formal invention, manufacturing intelligence and material innovation. This definitive book profiles hundreds of pieces in a substantial format perfect for reference in design libraries, studios and the homes of private collectors - or as an object of design in its own right. Each item of furniture is presented in detail, illustrated in colour and profiled via in-depth descriptive texts by Dominic Bradbury. The book's substantial reference section includes essays on materials (eg, plywood) and designer profiles. Work by a host of influential talents is profiled throughout, alongside lesser-known pieces by Piet Hein, Bruno Mathsson, Lina Bo Bardi and Alexander Girard.

A visual analysis of the colours used in furnishing fabrics and wallpapers from the 15th century to now, providing inspiration for designers. This simply structured and highly original book analyses the palettes that have been used by designers in the creation of furnishing fabrics and wallpapers from the 15th century to the present. The colours used in each pattern are presented in a simple proportional grid, giving a clear understanding of hues that have been expertly combined at different periods to create the designs we continue to admire and emulate. Spectrum opens with a brief introduction by interior design expert Ros Byam Shaw, exploring the history of colour as used in interiors. The fabrics and wallpapers that follow are arranged chronologically. Each is reproduced on its own double-page spread, and is accompanied by a brief narrative-style caption that provides information about each fabric or wallpaper and its significance in the context of interior design. Unique in such a book are the colour grids shown beside each pattern, in which the colours in the original piece are shown in proportion to their use, and with their CMYK references to enable designers to replicate these colours in their own work.

With expert analysis, great photography, and a huge selection of familiar and unusual objects, this book explains what truly makes a design great and reveals the hidden stories behind the everyday things that surround us. The author, a writer and journalist specialising in design, has chosen 101 objects that have had a major influence on the world of design history, delving into the makers, the designers, and developments in production and style that made these pieces into design classics. The text incorporates design sketches, portraits of many well-known and some unknown designers, as well as numerous exciting anecdotes from the sewing box of design history. The selection of designers includes, but is not limited to, legends such as Charles & Ray Eames, Verner Panton, Alexander Girard and other protagonists of classical modernism. Also here are post-war designers such as Finn Juhl, Gilbert Rohde, Pierre Paulin, and Gae Aulenti, and postmodern and contemporary designers such as Philippe Starck, Marcel Wanders, and Konstantin Grcic. This book provides an in-depth and informative overview of 20th-century design - and a glimpse of the first true classic objects of the 21st century.

Over 500 drawings scaled to 1/16" of pieces selected from leading museums: chairs, settees, chests, highboys, sideboards by Chippendale, Sheraton, Hepplewhite, Duncan Phyfe, etc. Colonial, American, Windsor, Louis XIV, 18th-century Dutch, etc. Accompanying text. 102 photographs.

For more than 40 years, Martin Waller and his company Andrew Martin have continued to demonstrate that furniture is more than just a functional object, and that a living space always finds new stories to tell. His Interior Design Review, the definitive standard work, unmatched in its variety and broad range of topics, is now being published in its 26th edition. One hundred designers, 500+ pages, 1,000 photographs - such is the opulent presentation of the latest interior trends in this magnificent coffee table book. With its special arrangement, the latest edition is once again a feast for the eyes of design lovers who want to unleash their creativity.

Today's American, hand-crafted furniture is bristling with originality. Blending art and functionality, David Ebner creates unique benches, tables, and chairs. This designer-craftsman's work subtly surpasses the limits of the furniture world and often crosses over into the realm of sculpture. Fine woods with interesting patterns are featured in his practical designs, which reflect natural elements of the places where he has worked in New York state. He fuses traditional and modern techniques and is well known for his scallion coat rack, Renwick benches, and Bellport chairs. See more than 340 color photos and sketches of Ebner's designs for diverse forms created with "twisted sticks," tubular metal, iron sections, and bamboo laminates. In his lifetime, he's made more than 1,400 pieces. Especially interesting are projects he continues to design today in his ever-evolving style.

Wallpaper's spread across trades, class and gender is charted in this first full-length study of the material's use in Britain during the long eighteenth century. It examines the types of wallpaper that were designed and produced and the interior spaces it occupied, from the country house to the homes of prosperous townsfolk and gentry, showing that wallpaper was hung by Earls and merchants as well as by aristocratic women. Drawing on a wide range of little known examples of interior schemes and surviving wallpapers, together with unpublished evidence from archives including letters and bills, it charts wallpaper's evolution across the century from cheap textile imitation to innovative new decorative material. Wallpaper's growth is considered not in terms of chronology, but rather alongside the categories used by eighteenth-century tradesmen and consumers, from plains to flocks, from China papers to papier mache and from stucco papers to materials for creating print rooms. It ends by assessing the ways in which eighteenth-century wallpaper was used to create historicist interiors in the twentieth century. Including a wide range of illustrations, many in colour, the book will be of interest to historians of material culture and design, scholars of art and architectural history as well as practicing designers and those interested in the historic interior.

The creative duo Charles Eames (1907-1978) and Ray Kaiser Eames (1912-1988) transformed the visual character of America. Though best known for their furniture, the husband and wife team were also forerunners in architecture, textile design, photography, and film. The Eameses' work defined a new, multifunctional modernity, exemplary for its integration of craft and design, as well as for the use of modern materials, notably plywood and plastics. The Eames Lounge Chair Wood, designed with molded plywood technology, became a defining furniture piece of the 20th century, while the couple's contribution to the Case Study Houses project not only made inventive use of industrial materials but also developed an adaptable floor plan of multipurpose spaces which would become a hallmark of postwar modern architecture. From the couple's earliest furniture experiments to their seminal short film Powers of Ten, this book covers all the aspects of the illustrious Eames repertoire and its revolutionary impact on middle-class American living. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Architecture series features: an introduction to the life and work of the architect the major works in chronological order information about the clients, architectural preconditions as well as construction problems and resolutions a list of all the selected works and a map indicating the locations of the best and most famous buildings approximately 120 illustrations (photographs, sketches, drafts, and plans)

Maximizing reader insights into the principles of designing furniture as wooden structures, this book discusses issues related to the history of furniture structures, their classification and characteristics, ergonomic approaches to anthropometric requirements and safety of use. It presents key methods and highlights common errors in designing the characteristics of the materials, components, joints and structures, as well as looking at the challenges regarding developing associated design documentation. Including analysis of how designers may go about calculating the stiffness and endurance of parts, joints and whole structures, the book analyzes questions regarding the loss of furniture stability and the resulting threats to health of the user, putting forward a concept of furniture design as an engineering processes. Creating an attractive, functional, ergonomic and safe piece of furniture is not only the fruit of the work of individual architects and artists, but requires an effort of many people working in interdisciplinary teams, this book is designed to add important knowledge to the literature for engineer approaches in furniture design.