Collecting Design

Collecting George Nakashima
George Nakashima was an architect, designer and thinker, but he called himself woodworker. For nearly five decades, he lived in New Hope Pennsylvania, creating some of the most memorable and poetic pieces of furniture in the history of American design. Considered by most historians as the hero of the Studio Movement, Nakashima represents its most successful story, and his pieces were the first Studio furniture to be collected in the secondary market. He integrated work, life, and the natural world which he admired, when crafting furniture that grew out of his philosophy and belief that every tree deserves another chance, ‘a second life,’ in his words.

Collecting Paul Evans
Paul Evans was a metalsmith, sculptor, and furniture designer, who crossed boundaries, and pioneered a new and provocative type of art furniture. His technical entrepreneurial skills have brought Evans into the forefront of the American Studio Movement during the postwar years. He was a revolutionary who, through a distinctive artistic vocabulary proved that furniture could be conceptualized as a form of an expressive art. The most ambitious representative of the crafted metal furniture of the 60s, Evans belonged to a generation that idealized studio making, and helped making the Philadelphia region into the most ambitious center of the Studio Furniture Movement in America.

Collecting Charlotte Perriand
Charlotte Perriand was one of the most gifted and active designers in postwar France. A quintessential Modernist, she devoted her career to the pursuit of affordable, innovative furnishings which would improve the daily lives of millions living in France and its colonies. Through her vision, ambition, and imagination, Perriand embraced an aesthetic of simplicity and promoted a healthy lifestyle. She was fascinated with new materials and progressive technologies, 38 always merging craft and industry. Passionate about social progress, her contribution to standardization 10 and prefabrication was immense. The Machine-Age, to her was an engine to move modernism from the margins into the mainstream, and to grant designers with social responsibility.

Collecting Frank Lloyd Wright
He is considered the most influential American architect of all time. His seminal ideas and over a thousand architectural works, he revolutionized the domestic interior and helped defining the modern home. To Frank Lloyd Wright, furniture was an integral part of his architecture, and his pieces have been collected by museums and passionate collectors worldwide for decades. By creating open plans, and integrating architecture into its landscape, Wright was constantly rethinking the American home and its furnishings. With an emphasis on a single large living space, conceived as the heart of the home that served multiple functions of living, dining, entertaining, and conversation, Wright envisioned a reformed and influential way of living.