What makes mid-century furniture so great, and what pieces of mid-century furniture – specifically – might you want to hunt down for your house? Let’s talk about finding the perfect vintage item, saving up for the perfect iconic chair, and when you just want to go “mid-century” instead of mid-century.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
DEPLOY your gorgeous MCM pieces
This post has a “how to” companion piece!
Whether you’re working with vintage finds, modern reproductions, or a mix of both, the right layout can make your home feel more spacious, inviting, and uniquely yours. Furniture placement isn’t just about making things fit—it’s about making your home feel right.
For advice on where and how to place your mid-century furniture … check out: Furniture Placement in Your Mid-Century Home.
Is it really Mid-Century Furniture or is it just “Mid-Century” Furniture
So … you’ve got options here. Let’s be aware of what they are.
It’s fine to have a preference for actual vintage pieces of furniture – manufactured in the MCM years – or to hanker after a brand new item crafted using the designs from a big name architect or creative of yore. And you can even get along – just fine – choosing contemporary designed and produced pieces that just have a vaguely mcm(ish) styling.
In fact, you can even mix and match.
Why choose actual vintage
Nothing is going to be more authentic than a vintage piece, particularly if you can track down its original provenance.
If the person who sells it to you can share it’s origin story, or has the 1050’s catalog that it was advertised from … that is so fun. Sometimes it’s even more fun to find a piece that has no background info and then hunt down the provenance yourself.
Why choose modern reproductions
On the other hand, if you yearn for authenticity, but you don’t really want to have pieces in your house that have been worn down by time, beaten up, sat on by other people … there are a lot of options today for purchasing brand new versions of authentic mid-century designs.
If this is what you’re looking for, you’re going to head to Design Within Reach, you’re going to head to Knoll, you’re going to head to Herman Miller, and you’ll find those authentic, licensed reproduction pieces by big name designers.
I’ll hit a few of my favorites in a moment …
Why choose “mid-century” style contemporary
There’s also a third option: you can get totally modern pieces that have a vibe of the mid-century design era.
They’ll use the right shapes, materials, and they give a nice mid-century-ish feeling to your space.
Some of these are direct knock offs of original designers, and some of them are just inspired by the design ethos of the mid-century era.
I do recommend against going too cheap here. I don’t think you’re ever going to love a piece of internet branded mid-century furniture that you get from a random supplier on Amazon. Plus … they won’t stand the test of time like an authentically vintage item.
Still, for many people modern pieces in a mid-century style are often the right way to go specifically for upholstered pieces of mid-century furniture. They are going to offer more cush and comfort than your grandparent’s sofa will.
Where can I get good modern “mid-century” (ish) furniture?
If you’re aiming for a cosy TV watching sofa that can play nicely with your vintage sourced coffee table and sideboard … here’s an incomplete list of modern mid-century(ish) furniture sources
Joybird
Joy bird is probably my personal favorite of new upholstered pieces that can at least play well with your mid-century furniture.
They have a whole bunch of sofa sets that are simply contemporary, bigger, cozier, plusher than mid-century appropriate. But they got their start in fun reproduction mid-century furniture pieces and their Soto chair, the Hughes line, the Eliot line, the Owen chair, these are all great additions to a mid-century living room.
I like their focus on quality with great fabrics and made to order pieces. It reminds me of the more solid days when mid-century furniture was built to last.
Blu Dot
Blu dot is a Midwest based furniture company started by two architecture school grads who set out to make modern furniture at affordable prices.
I’d probably class them as more modern than mid-century furniture, but their work will all fit in nicely with vintage pieces.
Burrow and Article
Burrow is a direct to consumer brand that it’s about 10 years old – surfing the wave of “everybody’s getting excited about mid-century” from the last decade. They create comfortable pieces of lookalike or slightly tweaked in style”mid-century” furniture.
So if you’re looking for something vaguely Florence Knoll ish, but with a built in USB charging port, there’s your compromise.
Article is another option for great modern pieces that don’t go through a bunch of retail filters to get to your door. Their pieces are are solidly made in contemporary and mid-century styles.
West Elm and CB2 And All Modern
If you want to go sit on something in a showroom before you buy … and you want a showroom in the major city near you, West Elm has both contemporary and mid-century furniture in its style array. They ALSO have a nice focus on sustainability. Their eco-friendly manufacturing process prioritizes FSC certified wood, recycled and upcycled materials. I think of them as the kind of go to apartment furnishing starter spot, but they have pieces that can mix and match with your wider array of mid-century furniture.
And similarly, CB2, youth mid-century spin off of Crate and Barrel, has that easy, lightweight … let’s not call it fast fashion, maybe the mid speed fashion – version of mid-century furniture.
You can pick up a nice enough looking knockoff of a Saarinen tulip table there, for example. And yeah, I’ve done that.
If you’re looking for the fast fashion version “mid-century” ish design … All Modern is going to be your online clearing house for pretty good looking, pretty cheap knock offs of mid-century furniture pieces. They’ll have some nice wood grain, some pleasing angled lines and some more contemporary features, like being assembled with a hex wrench or having replaceable slipcovers.
Don’t forget your ethics at the water’s edge
Wherever you’re sourcing your modern mid-century style furniture, think a little bit about where it’s coming from, who’s making it.
It’s nice to consider a factory process that’s beneficial to workers and to local economies.
And if I want to go for a BIG NAME piece to authenticate my whole house? Where do I start then!?!
Let’s now switch back to some of those modern reproductions, the licensed continuously in production, versions of the iconic, the big name pieces of furniture. I’m going to focus on chairs.
Iconic Architect Designed MCM Chairs
Why chairs … because they are dramatic, often colorful, you can actually sit in them and they are more affordable than larger pieces.
Barcelona Chair
I’m going to start with one not from the mid-century. But is often classed with Mid Mod chairs. It’s pretty instantly recognisable, too: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona chair designed for 1929 World Exposition in Barcelona, Spain.
These days you’ll be most likely to see this in the lobbies of expensive high rise apartments and in offices. A sightly swooping structural x of criss-crossing legs on each side, rendered in bar stock steel with hand polished chrome frame. Then the seat back and back set over a woven leather net and made of individual squares of leather forming a precise grid. It’s more lovely than comfortable. (Although more comfortable than some other famous architect designed chairs I could name)
Why begin here?
Well this chair is still for sale on the knoll furniture website and often gets lumped in with other mid-century furniture pieces. But I think it falls into the classic of an architect wanting total control of their building. Right down to the objects that are placed inside it.
Origami chair (or Taliesin 1 arm chair)
Let’s ride that train of thought right to the Taliesin 1 arm chair – also known as the origami chair – in which I have not had the pleasure to sit but which looks about as rigidly uncomfortable even though it was designed by Frank LLoyd wright in 1949 for his own living room at Taliesin West.
And it’s recently been reissued for production! It’s an angular construction of chunky plywood with a seat that slopes back and is supported on the same straight piece that forms the back leg. The arm chair part comes from a pair of wing style arms that seem to have been folded out like origami – and would certainly require a person to either sit with their elbows tucked tightly in OR kind of man spread, with elbows out.
But I did find internet folks who have sat in this one and claim it’s quite comfortable to lounge in if you likea lean back arm chair sort of chair.
Egg chair
Designed by Arne Jacobsen for his SAS hotel in 1958. I always think of this one as a little silly. It doesn’t really have armrests per se, not that you could really resto your arms on but it has such a dramatic back. This makes it both a great add to a room – it really holds the space while empty – AND a great substitute throne if you want to be the center of attention. That may be why it’s a staple of film sets.
My mind always goes to Will Ferrel as supervillain Mugato in Zoolander sitting in a white one to match his white dog and bleached hair.
Actually I think it’s misused as a fancy throne style seat. I was only really sold on the idea of this one when I saw this photo of Jacobsen, himself, seated at a diagonal, with one knee up to support his reading – sort of slouched down and with his head against one angled side piece.
THAT’s the kind of armchair I can get behind. Or get into.
Speaking of round stylized chairs you actually can’t get comfortable in, the …
Ovalia Egg Chair
The Ovalia Egg Chair is the one that actually looks like an egg with a hollowed out oval on most of one side. Designed by Henrik Thor-Larsen in 1968 is the one you might think about when you hear the term egg chair.
It’s also the one that Will Smith so iconically takes his Men in Black test sitting in. We should note .. he noisily snags an Eero Saarinen tulip table to fill in his test … It must have been a marble top design to be so noisy! I do love that he offers to share the table with the other test takers. Go teamwork. Anyway!
Maybe it IS cozy to sit in but it’s certainly go a pleasant seat for a job interview.
From here I guess I’m obligated to step sideways into the Saarinen tulip table design. BUt I want to stop quickly at another Saarinen design that falls under the category: “round stylized chairs you absolutely can get comfortable in” …
Womb chair
This is meant to be an actual, comfortable, woman friendly lounge chair. It’s not just in the name. It’s the whole back story. Florence Knoll – who absolutely deserves her own podcast episode some week – was a design student at the Cranbrook Academy and a mentee of Eliel Saarinen it’s then president. She was always assumed into roles as an interiors specialist when she tired to work with architects and eventually took a job with the Knoll furniture company. She led the design end of the renewed company that was to become a juggernaut of mid-century and modern furniture influence, recruiting architect like Mies van der Rohe to give them the rights to his barcelona chair – and commissioning new works from architects and artists. You’ve heard some of these names already and you’ll hear more later in this episode: Noguchi, Bertoia, Breuer and more.
Anyway, Florence asked her friend Eero Saarinen to come up with an actually comfortable chair. Here’s how it’s described on the Knoll website: “I told Eero I was sick and tired of the one-dimensional lounge chair…long and narrow. I want a chair I can sit sideways in or any other way I want,” she said of her 1946 request.
Tulip Armchair, Tulip Chair, Tulip Table
These collectively are the design of Eero Saarinen submitted for the MOMA “Organic Design in Home Furnishings competition” between 1953 and 58.
I love these pieces! I had a CB2 knock off of the tulip table in the chicago apartment I shared with my sister and it was a wonderful piece. Fun to put your feet on the base and slide them up it’s simple curve. Solid and stable. And easy to move a collection of chairs around.
I also love the story behind the design. Saarinen thought that the everyday visual clutter of a bunch of four legged chairs, pushed in around a four legged table was messy to look at.
(Or perhaps he just got sick of layering the legs over each other in perspective sketches – and if so – relatable).
In any case, he wanted a more minimalist under table aesthetic. And he made one up.
The tulip base is die cast aluminum – one solid unit. His tulip chairs – both the dining chair and armchair are fiberglass – apparently he’d originally wanted the entire unit to be fiberglass but it wasn’t strong enough.
Modern materials are our FRIENDS in mid-century furniture!
Don’t be scared of metal, of plastic or of plywood and veneer!
This trips up a lot of people. They are afraid that mid-century furniture is only worth something, if it’s solid wood, but actually very little mid-century furniture has solid wood finishes.
The very fact that MCM furniture designers used veneer is how those pieces get the really light, fine wood grain. It’s because they’re not cutting straight through each ring of a tree, even an old growth one.
They’re slicing around the ring as it ripples. They’re inwardly spiraling, getting ring after ring in close succession.
And that very densely patterned grain in plywood, the veneer taken from the outer circumference of old growth pine, teak or walnut, is what we have come to associate with the beautiful patterns of wood and cabinetry and mid-century homes in wall panels, in cabinet finishes, in furniture.
Veneer is not a bad word in mid-century furniture, and neither, by the way, is plywood.
Don’t let the trauma of your first piece of post college IKEA flat pack and the way that it fell apart prejudice you against good quality mid-century veneer furniture.
Speaking of plywood …
Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman
The Eames Lounge chair (and ottoman) feels like the GO TO “get” for a modern mcm furniture collector. Created by design powerhouse couple Charles and Ray Eames in 1956 it was meant to be an update of that American classic the living room lounge chair.
It may be both very expensive and very lux feeling with it’s worn in leather upholstery but it’s also pushing the envelope of high tech modern design with it’s molded plywood frame. Ray and Charles had been working in plywood when they were tapped by the US Navy to create a lightweight inexpensive splint from plywood – a method they called ply form. Something like 150,000 were produced and they also created prototypes for arm splints, carrying litters and other things.
The Eames chair has a bit of a biomedical feeling when you look at it in a certain way. The exo spine metal piece that connects the back and headrest, the tilt you back at the dentist office recline. Is that just me?
Ok one more reminder that your mcm doesn’t have to be Name Brand to be great.
GREAT reference for every day vintage furniture
If you want to dip into history lessons for your facebook marketplace finds … you want to explore this collection of vintage ads.
Check out BostonMCM.com!
They are, as you might expect from the name, a Boston based mid-century furniture store. Check out their websites’s pull down tab called “Vintage Ads & Catalogs” where they have organized original newspaper and magazine ads for dozens of lines of mid-century furniture.
Even if you’re not on the hunt, go over and have a look at this website. Poke through some of the options.
If you already have some – as far as you’re aware – nameless pieces of mid-century furniture picked up in antique stores or from other people, this might be a place to find out more!
Don’t miss the Broyhill “Brasilia” line
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Read the Full Episode Transcript
So let’s talk about what makes mid-century furniture so great, and what pieces of mid-century furniture specifically you might want to hunt down for your house, perhaps comfortable, perhaps something that can up your mid-century cool factor, pieces that can make up for the deficits in the design of your house itself, now in the short term or even over time, hunting down the perfect, authenticated vintage piece, saving up for an iconic reproduction from one of the big furniture houses still around today, or just happening across a beautiful, nameless item in a dusty antique store can be such a thrill today.
Let’s talk about what makes a find like that so great, and how to harness the power of mid-century furniture to make your mid-century home even better. Hey there. Welcome back to mid mom remodel. This is the show about updating MCM homes, helping you match a mid-century home to your modern life. I’m your host. Della Hansmann, architect and mid-century ranch enthusiast.
You’re listening to Episode 2012 Today’s episode is going to be chock full of references that you’re probably going to want to follow up on, and visual links. I’ve done a bunch of sketching just like I did for the mid-century light fixtures, episode of pieces of mid-century furniture that light me up, that I like. And also, you’re going to want to go to links or follow up specific name recommendations for iconic designers, architects, current stores where you might hunt down modern reproductions or references to vintage furniture lines like the Brea Hill Brasilia line or lane or other things like that.
So some of themes you will catch as I go along. This is going to be an interesting episode to listen to, but if you want to check the visual references or look for links, you’re going to find all of that at the show notes page at mid mod midwest.com/ 2012 don’t miss that first.
A quick note on working with mid mod Midwest, we’ve actually had a couple of clients whose lives got busy that needed to push back their design process, leaving a quick action gap in our schedule. So if you’ve been on the fence about Is now the right time, do you want to start a master plan process? I recommend you hop in and get this satisfaction.
Normally, when someone signs a master plan proposal with us, we give them their design homework, and then they’ve got to wait a couple of weeks or even months before we get to the start of the kickoff meeting of their process. Right now, the next person who hops onto our roster is probably going to get a really fast turnaround, so this might be the sort of you’ve been dragging your feet.
Now you want to leap into action. Moment you’ve been looking for right now, in the next week or two is also an excellent time to get me on a call, because I’m going to be traveling in later April, and less available for those initial consultation calls to check out whether a master plan is the right process for your project, and whether your project is a great fit for our process. Now’s your moment.
Bop on over to our services page. You can find it on our website under the heading, work with us, or you can go straight to mid mod midwest.com/services to learn all about our master plan process and just go ahead and apply to work with us. We’ll reach right back to you as soon as you do to schedule a time for our initial chat. Let’s get the ball rolling for this week’s resource, I wanted to do something furniture adjacent.
So I’m reaching way back into the archives to a PDF I put together in the early days of the pandemic, back when we were all panicking about being shut in in our houses and looking to make extra space without being able to expand the walls, I put together this little resource on how to create micro spaces within your home, how to create cozy nooks that would allow you to feel like you were in a slightly different part of the room, having a slightly different experience, even within the footprint of your existing spaces.
And how to carve out an away nook from an unused corner, a closet, an extra room, a basement storage spot using the furniture and materials you already have. Now that we have a little more freedom of movement and to go out and purchase things, you could also create a fun nook by hunting down some new pieces or mixing and matching some new and existing pieces of mid-century furniture that you have.
So let’s just talk about the components of a good nook. And a nook might be a reading chair, it might be a tucked away work from home office spot. It might be a place to sit outside, but it has a couple of features in common. Every time you need a comfortable seat. It could be a sofa, it could be a chair, it could be a built in bench. I recommend something upholstered because a Nook is a place that you want to sit and stay for a while.
Near that seat, you need a shelf, a table, a coffee table, a bookshelf, a bench, a stool, some sort of a surface where you can set things down that might be a book, a drink, a snack, a laptop, something you don’t want to put on the floor when you get up and walk away. It can also be very nice to have a place to put your feet up now, a footstool can do double duty as your shelf, your table, but it’s nice to have a separate spot to plop your feet up so you can shift position and kind of squirm around over time.
I’ll be talking later in the episode about that idea of furniture you can get comfortable in no good Nook is complete without a source of light if. Day light works in the daytime, of course, but you’re probably also going to want some sort of task. Light for cloudy days, for rain or for when it gets dark.
A pendant light, or a table lamp, can create a little bubble of light for the space after dark. But a pendant light, particularly a plug in swag pendant, go back and check out my episode on mid-century lighting. I think that was 2006, just a few weeks ago. This is a great opportunity to create a visual space when you are not using the Nook. You look over at it and you see a seat, a shelf and a light hanging down over it, and it will really define that cozy come over here, sit down and take a load off feeling.
And then finally, you need a power source, because we live in a plugged in age. If you don’t charge near your reading chair, you won’t spend a long time there. So run a power strip from the nearest outlet discretely along a wall and hide it somewhere under the shelf so that you can easily charge your devices. This recipe can be repeated over and over again your house, at the bedside table in a child’s play area in each den.
Not only do you want a social space where a bunch of people can hang out together, but it’s nice to create these little nooks where one person, or possibly two people, can step aside from the general flow of space and just get cozy. Get inspired to create a little extra space with no extra square footage in your home using just furniture that you have around your house, or perhaps furniture that you hunt down by going over to my website mid mod midwest.com/nooks to get the free download, it’ll walk you through all the ideas and have some helpful sketches to get you started.
Get links to everything I mentioned in the episode and spelling correctly for all of the names I’m about to throw at you in the show notes page at mid mod, midbus.com/ 2012 Okay, two weeks ago, we talked about how to use furniture in a mid-century home to create spaces that are actually going to work well for your life. How to think about the way you move through rooms.
How to think about the way materials and colors and patterns tie together to draw you into a space and make it feel stylistically connected, and how to think about the proper spacing, anchoring and proportions of the layout of your mid-century furniture. And I promised that today we would talk about the pieces of mid-century furniture that you actually want to use.
But please bear in mind these two components, the actual mid-century pieces, or the modern reproductions thereof, and the way you lay them out, these go hand in hand. So can treat these two episodes as companions. If you skipped the episode two weeks ago on how to use furniture in a mid-century home, go back two weeks, and check that one out too, but also, if you’re coming straight here from there, welcome.
We’re going to talk about how the style and the specific pieces that you choose add up to a great overall vibe for your home, and how furniture, the right choices of furniture, the right materiality and the furniture that you choose can help you to temporarily paper over a too bland or a too simple mid-century home, and can always augment the style, the authenticity, the material, palette, the richness of a mid-century designed home.
Let’s start right off the bat by acknowledging that the term mid-century furniture, when thrown into a Google search engine is going to give you a lot more contemporary, manufactured, designed, produced pieces, as opposed to authentic mid-century designs that are produced today or vintage pieces. This is just sort of the nature of the for sale part of the internet, and it’s absolutely the same as when we talked about mid-century light fixtures.
If you put mid-century light fixture into a search term, you’re going to get a bunch of things that are simply advertised. They’re keyword branded as mid-century, rather than actually having any connection to the mid-century era specifically.
So part of the purpose of this episode is to give you some of the names to go pop into your search term to ask for in stores so that you can look for you can get beyond that sort of modern reproduction, modern mid-century-ish furniture vibe that is so what you’re going to hit first if you go looking online in stores generally, there is, however, a place for modern, quote, unquote, mid-century furniture, alongside vintage, authentic pieces and licensed modern reproductions.
So I just want to start there. This is probably going to be the place that most people begin when they are dipping their toe into the world of mid-century. Unless you’re lucky enough to have somebody, who’s holding your hand or someone who’s gifted or left you a bunch of authentic vintage pieces, you probably start by thinking you like mid-century. So you put mid-century into a search term, and a search term, and you get some modern mid-century furniture pieces.
Now there’s pros and cons to each of these ways to going about getting mid-century style into your life. Each of them have their pros and cons. Nothing is going to be more authentic than a vintage piece, particularly if you can track down its original provenance.
If the person who sells it to you is like, here’s the sale information of it, or here’s the original catalog that it was advertised from, this is so fun. Sometimes it’s even more fun to find a piece that has no provenance and then hunt down the provenance yourself. It’s the ultimate prize sort of antiquer dream.
On the other hand, if you yearn for authenticity, but you don’t really want to have pieces in your house that have been worn down by time, beaten up, sat on by other people. There are a lot of options today for purchasing brand new versions of authentic mid-century designs, and I’ll talk about that in a moment.
It’s not going to be cheap, because the furniture companies that are licensed to still produce these are all extremely high end the irony is that many of these designs were originally meant to be relatively affordable. The mid-century was not an era remember of aspirational, high end luxury.
It was a time of playfulness, practicality, comfort, future, forward, modern, optimism. It was an egalitarian era. Just look at the tax code that they had then. It’s not an accident that there was such a burgeoning middle class and such an availability of design features for people in that time. That’s a different podcast episode. But it’s an irony worth noting that a lot of the design that was created by designers in the mid-century era as meant to be everyman furniture is now extremely high end.
But if that’s what you’re looking for, you’re going to head to Design Within Reach, you’re going to head to Noel, you’re going to head to Herman Miller, and you’re going to find those authentic, licensed reproduction pieces. There’s also a third option; you can get totally modern pieces that have a vibe of the mid-century design era.
They use the right shapes, hypothetically, the right material, and they give a nice mid-century-ish feeling to your space. Some of these are direct knock offs of original designers, and some of them are just inspired by the design ethos of the mid-century era. I do recommend against going too cheap here. I don’t think you’re ever going to love a piece of internet branded mid-century furniture that you get from a random supplier on Amazon.
It might be a fun starting place if you’re just dipping your toe in the water, but I bet you can find something for a similar price point that is authentically vintage by hunting around a little bit in antique stores or checking out other options on Facebook, marketplace or online and ironically, those vintage pieces will hold up better and last longer than a brand new piece of furniture that is manufactured to Amazon modern standards, but modern pieces in a mid-century style are often the right way to go for upholstery, specifically upholstered pieces of mid-century furniture.
You may not want to go vintage. There are some die hards out there, and frankly, I’m one of them who are perfectly willing to sit on the indestructible sort of Declan woven upholstery materials of a found armchair that is slowly letting its little old lady smell dissipate into the home. I’ve got one here in my office, and you know, and live with the fact that one armrest is distinctly more sun faded than the other and always will be.
But there is a middle ground here, too, by the way, you can find vintage pieces and have them reupholstered restrung, get new cushions, new fabric, and turn them into entirely new pieces. Or you can source them from someone who does that here in Wisconsin, for example, check out the amazing BC modern in Milwaukee.
They’re a super vintage store that sources from home sales and estate sales, and they really curate their collection to the extent that they are open for sale only one weekend per month. But they go to the trouble to refinish and reupholster nearly all of their soft vintage furniture pieces, and they choose gorgeous, high end, mid-century appropriate surfaces. It’s worth checking out.
There are other similar dealers around there who are finding original mid-century pieces that have some of their Woodworks showing and beautifully restoring them. This is an option, but if you’re looking for something, you can pick out of a catalog, match, get the size dimensions, know it’s available. Order it when you want to save up for it, then you’re going to be looking for some of the modern, updated mid-century style of home furnishings. You’re going to check out Joy bird, West Elm article blue dot.
Let me give a little more of a rundown than that. Joy bird is probably my, my personal favorite of new upholstered pieces that can at least play well with your mid-century furniture. They have a whole bunch of sofa sets that are simply contemporary, bigger, cozier, plusher than mid-century appropriate, and that might be what you want,
But they got their start in fun reproduction mid-century furniture pieces and their Soto chair, the Hughes line, the Elliot, the Owen lines, these are all great additions to a mid-century living room. I like their focus on quality with great fabrics and made to order pieces. It reminds me of the more solid days when mid-century furniture was built to last.
Blue dot is a Midwest based furniture company started by two architecture school grads who set out to make modern furniture at affordable prices. I probably class them as more modern than mid-century furniture, but it will all fit in nicely with vintage pieces. Burrow is a direct to consumer brand that it’s about 10 years old. Creating on that everybody’s getting excited about mid-century, about 10 years ago, and they create comfortable pieces of lookalike or slightly tweaked in style, quote, unquote, mid-century furniture.
So if you’re looking for something vaguely Florence Knoll ish, but with a built in USB charging port, there’s your compromise article. Is another similar option for great modern pieces that don’t go through a bunch of Retail Showroom filters to get to your door and are solidly made in contemporary and mid-century styles for if you want to go sit on them in a showroom and you want a showroom near you or in the major city near you, West Elm has both contemporary and mid-century furniture in its style array.
They have a nice focus on sustainability. Their eco-friendly manufacturing process prioritizes FSC certified wood, recycled and upcycled materials. I think of them as the kind of go to apartment furnishing starter spot, but they have pieces that can mix and match with your wider array of mid-century furniture. And similarly, CB 2, which is the sort of youth mid-century spin off of Crate and Barrel, has that easy, lightweight, let’s not call it fast fashion. Maybe the mid speed fashion version of mid-century furniture.
You can pick up a nice enough looking knockoff of a serine and tulip table there, for example. And yeah, I’ve done that. If you’re looking for general sort of, let’s call it the fast fashion version that I would endorse of mid-century, all modern is going to be your online clearing house for pretty good looking cheap knock offs of mid-century furniture pieces, they’ll have some nice wood grains, some pleasing angled lines and some more contemporary features, like being assembled with a hex wrench or having replaceable slip covers.
But I do recommend that wherever you’re sourcing your modern mid-century style furniture, think a little bit about where it’s coming from, who’s making it. It’s nice to think about a factory process that’s beneficial to workers and to local economies. So we just went sort of down the range of modern available mid-century style furniture. Let’s now switch back to some of those modern reproductions, the licensed continuously in production, versions of the iconic, the big name pieces of furniture. I’m going to focus on chairs for a couple of reasons.
One, chairs are the sort of style icon. They’re dramatic, they’re often colorful. You can actually sit in them. They’re slightly more affordable than larger pieces, and they’re the sort of little craftsman piece that many architects like to create, to go ahead and put their stamp onto every single aspect of a building.
And while we’re listing off iconic mid-century architect designed chairs, I’m going to start with one that’s not from the mid-century but is often classed with mid-century chairs, the Barcelona chair by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. He designed this for the 1929 World Exposition in Barcelona, Spain. So that’s pre mid-century, although it is in the modernist era, and these days, you’ll be most likely to see this one in the lobbies of expensive high rise apartments and offices. It’s that. It’s that hard modernist style that just suits a glass skyscraper.
It has a slightly swooping structural x of criss crossing legs on each side, rendered in bar stock steel with hand polished chrome frame. And then the seat back is set over a woven leather net and has individual squares of leather forming this precise grid. I find them more lovely than comfortable, although more comfortable than some other famous architect design chairs I could name the library of the School of Architecture at my grad school program at University of Minnesota had a collection of architect design chairs in the lobby, and no one was ever sitting in them, because they were all wildly uncomfortable to occupy, actually.
But anyway, I choose to begin with the Barcelona chair because it’s still for sale on the knoll furniture website, and it often gets lumped in with other mid-century furniture pieces, but I think it just falls into the icon of a classic architect wanting total control of their building right down to every object placed inside.
So I’m going to ride that train of thought right over to Frank Lloyd Wright to the Taliesin one armchair, also known as the origami chair, in which I have not had the pleasure to sit, but which to me looks about as rigidly uncomfortable as it could be, even though it was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1949 for his own living room at Taliesin West.
It’s often called the origami chair because it has an angular construction of plywood pieces that sort of fit together in interlocking components with a same straight piece forms the sloping seat of the chair that angles back, and then the back leg, the armchair comes up, and then wings outward, seeming to be folded like origami.
And to me, seems like it would require a person to sort of sit with their elbows either tightly tucked in, or kind of man spread elbows out, like many mid-century chairs that came later, it doesn’t have a high back or headrest because it’s meant to be low. I talked about this a couple of weeks ago.
Mid-century furniture is often kind of meant to be low to the ground, so you’ve got more headroom in an eight foot ceiling. Your taste in mid-century tips towards the organic modern if you’re looking for something that’s more right. In or you’re trying to make your house more right in, then looking for pieces of Wright’s design furniture.
They will not be cheap. They’ll help tell the story of your house that you’re leaning it in a direction of organic, modern. This is one of the ways that you can use furniture to define where you’re headed. One of my personal favorite pieces of mid-century design to look at is the egg chair, designed by Arnie Jacobson for his SAS hotel in 1958 I also sourced one of his light fixtures for that designed for that same hotel in the mid-century lighting episode.
Arne Jacobson just a class act. It doesn’t really have armrests, per se, so I wouldn’t call it an armchair. It also has this dramatic back with sort of two horned wings coming up on either side. It makes it a great add to a room. It can really hold the space while empty. And it’s kind of a great substitute throne. If you want to be the center of attention in your own space. That might be why it’s such a staple of film sets.
For me, I always go to Will Ferrell as the super villain, Bugatti and Zoolander. Yeah, I’m dating myself with this one, but he sits in a white egg chair to match his white dog and his bleached hair, and he looks ridiculous. I’ve always thought though it’s kind of misused as a fancy throne style seat.
And I only really got sold on the idea of the chair myself when I saw a photo of Arne Jacobson sitting in his own design, and he was curled up, seating at a diagonal. He’s dressed as a man in the 50s suit pipe, but he’s got one knee up to support his reading and the hand holding the pipe sort of slouched down with his head against one angled side piece.
That’s the kind of armchair I can get behind or get into. Personal standard of a good quality chair is one that’s comfortable to sit in. Here’s one that’s not the ovalia egg chair. Is often mistaken for the Jacobson egg chair, but this one was designed by Henrik Thor Larson in 1968 and it’s what you’re probably thinking about when you hear the term egg chair. It’s got the egg shape with a hollowed out oval on most of one side.
This is the chair that Will Smith so iconically takes his men in black test sitting in I should note, he noisily snags an aero Saarinen tulip table to fill in his test. It must have been the marble top design because it is so noisy. And I love that he offers to share the table with the other test takers. Go teamwork. But anyway, it is certainly not a pleasant seat for a job interview.
And I would argue it doesn’t really seem like it’s a pleasant seat for anywhere. If we’re talking about round, stylized chairs you can absolutely get comfortable in. I would point to the chair that I happen to have in my own living room, or at least, I have a cheap knockoff thereof. Remember when you know what the major name designers are, you can choose to spring for the big names, or you can find the versions that work for you.
And in my case, my cheap knockoff of a womb chair that I got from someone who didn’t know or like what it was on Facebook marketplace, I got it for 50 bucks. The authentic version retails for $5,000 so literally, 1% of its value. Someday. Do I aspire to a real one? Yeah, maybe. But this one is also doing the job of being comfortable to sit in now that’s because of its whole backstory.
Florence Knoll, who absolutely deserves her own podcast episode some week, was first a design student at the Cranbrook Academy in Michigan and a mentee of Elio Saarinen, who it’s then president. She worked in design her whole life. Unfortunately, she was never able to be the architect she wanted to be. She was always assessed into roles as an interior specialist because she was the girl.
But eventually, she took a job with the knoll furniture company. She married into the family, but she then led the design end of the renewed company, and after her husband died, she maintained the company for decades, led it to become the juggernaut of mid-century and modern furniture influence that it is, and where she recruited Architects like Mies van der Rohe, a mentor of hers, to give them the rights to the Barcelona chair, which I talked about first and commissioned new works from architects and artists.
You’ve heard these names, and you’ll hear them again, Noguchi, bertoya, Breuer and more. Anyway, Florence asked her friend arrow Saarinen to come up with an actually comfortable armchair. Here’s how it’s described on the knoll website. I told arrow I was sick and tired of the one dimensional lounge chair, long and narrow. I wanted a chair I could sit sideways or any other way I want.
In 1946 he came up with this. Her chair like a basket of pillows, is still remarkably comfortable today, even stocked up against more modern options of hyper upholstered, oversized furniture, and it’s infinitely cuter when we’re talking about the work that Eero Saarinen did for Florence Knoll, we have to talk about the tulip table, the tulip chair, the tulip armchair. These make me smile.
They were originally submitted for the Museum of Modern Art, organic design and home furnishing competition several times between 1953 and 58 and I love them so much. I. I had a CB two knockoff of the tulip table in the Chicago apartment I shared with my sister, and it’s just a wonderful concept of a piece of furniture. It’s fun to put your feet on the base and slide them up the curve. It’s solid and stable. It’s easy to move a collection of chairs around. And I love the story behind it.
Apparently, Saarinen thought that the everyday visual clutter of a bunch of four legged chairs pushed in around a four legged table was messy to look at. Or maybe he just got sick of layering legs over each other in perspective sketches. And if so, man, I can relate. I still struggle with this problem in my perspective sketches for clients today. In any case, he wanted a more minimalist under Table esthetic, and so he made one up. Actually, his quote on the subject is not to be skipped.
He said, The undercarriage of chairs and table in a typical interior makes an ugly, confusing, unrestful world. I wanted to clear up the slum of legs. I wanted to make the chair all one thing again. I love this. In the end, the tulip base is die cast aluminum, one solid unit, and the chairs are fiber class. But apparently, he’d originally wanted the entire unit to be fiber class. It just wasn’t strong enough.
This is a great moment to sidetrack into the modern materials that mid-century designers were working with. We tend to put a premium on things being solid wood, because we are living in this era of cheap particle board furniture. But the mid-century, moderns were excited about new material technology. They were playing with plywood; they were playing with fiberglass.
They were playing with metal, trying to cover it and shape it and get it into aspects that could be fun and functional and practical and really long lasting. And this really from here, we sidestepped straight into the Eames lounge chair and ottoman, which is probably the go to get for a modern, mid-century furniture collector. This is the sort of classic plywood and leather
you just see it standing in the corner of every photo of a sort of atomic ranch house, and it often is a fun place to occupy. I know people who have them do lounge in them, but you kind of buy one these days to say that you get it, that you are an Eames lounge chair kind of person.
This was designed originally by the powerhouse couple Charles and Ray Eames in 1956 and meant to be an update of the classic American living room lounge chair. It was meant to be Lux, feeling comfortable, feeling with its worn in leather upholstery, but it was also pushing the envelope of high tech modern design with its molded plywood frame.
Charles and Ray had been working in plywood when they were tapped by the US Navy during World War Two to create a lightweight, inexpensive splint from plywood, a method they called ply form, and about 150,000 of those were produced. They also created prototypes for ARM splints carrying letters and other things in plywood. I actually think the Eames chair itself has a bit of a biomedical feeling when you look at it in a certain way, that exospine metal piece that connects the back to the headrest, even the way it angles you back, has a little bit of a dentist’s office feeling.
Maybe that’s just me. In any case, this roundup should get you started. I have pictures, sketches of these on the show notes page for all of these iconic architect designed name pieces of furniture, but in an episode about mid-century furniture, I would be remiss if we didn’t go beyond the name brand. I think that it’s more important for you to think about vibes, quality, what you get out of bringing mid-century furniture into your house.
And I will mention a few more. I’ll drop a few more names. Some of them you’ll recognize, the Broyhill Brasilia line, but I’m also going to talk about lane and crowler and Sears. This is a nice place to mention some of the other mid-century furniture pieces that I’ve happened across, which is I’ve got my grandparents bedroom set that I asked for when we were breaking up my grandparents’ house after my grandfather’s death, and none of my parents, my aunts and uncles, they all thought that with stuff was super lame.
I was barely into mid-century myself, but I already knew that the beautiful wood grain on that dresser, low boy and bedside table and headboard was something that I wasn’t going to find in a modern store, and it really preceded my love of mid-century. It’s not Breyer Hill Brasilia, it’s not even any kind of name brand, but I have the little handwritten receipt from their 1953 purchase from the Racine Wisconsin furniture store where they got it. It doesn’t need to be anything more than that to make me happy.
The family connection is fun, but I could probably enjoy it just as much if I had turned it up at an estate sale or a find on Facebook marketplace. I’m just as fond, for example, of the headboard that I picked up for my guest room a while back that I know nothing about its provenance, but I found it in a dusty old antique shop as I was over in another town picking up a tension pole lamp on Facebook marketplace, I just decided to poke my head into a big old furniture store, and turns out there was one in an empty ish storefront on Main Street filled with combination of weird tat from the 80s and 90s that doesn’t appeal to me personally, but I don’t know, might be someone else’s dream object and a bunch of Old Country Chic pieces from a much earlier era than my interest, but I found it leaning against the wall on an upper floor and hidden behind several other pieces.
I wasn’t looking for a headboard, but as I saw it, I realized it could be perfect for my guest room. So I ran downstairs, measured my car, which is a tiny hatchback, and estimated that it would fit, if I was lucky. So I grabbed it. The thing that it really endears me to that headboard, aside from the fact that it’s nice wood grain, nice pattern, is the story behind it that I will never forget.
Of the conversation I had with a nice little old lady who was manning the desk, she asked me right after I told her I was going to buy it if I was married, which I thought, honestly, was a bit of an odd question. But I said, No. We made a bit more small talk, and it came out basically that she was shocked at the concept of my walking into a furniture store on a Saturday afternoon, seeing something I liked, laying down cash for it and walking out with it without reference to anyone else.
And she told me, shyly that she was living alone for the first time in her life. Now she missed her husband, she said, but she had never lived alone, and she was finding it kind of freeing. She’d gone straight from a girl’s dormitory to her wedding at her parents recommendation, and now she told me she wished she’d lived alone for a while as a younger woman, it was just such an interesting insight into a life of someone who’s my mom’s contemporary, but had had really lived a much more sheltered, a much more gender traditional existence, and she was clearly bemused by my independence.
She followed me out of the store and held the tension pull lamp that I’d already bought while I jammed the headboard into my car, adjusting the driver’s seat far, as far forward as it would go. And she waved me off from the Main Street, small town, diagonal parking spot when I left.
Anyway, I wouldn’t trade that story for anything that that headboard is infinitely more valuable to me than if I drooled over it on a high end website for months at a time, and it was 99 bucks. So you know what a great find. I want to pivot back. This is sort of a strange anecdote, but I want to pivot want to pivot back to what makes mid-century furniture so great, vintage furniture, specifically for a mid-century home. It’s not just the story about the sweet little old lady who sells it to you.
What’s so special about that headboard, if I don’t know who designed it and what year it was manufactured, and the material it’s made of, is that? Well, for first thing I could guess, I could go online and check out source’s original ads, see if I could match the pattern to an original mid-century line of produced furniture that would be interesting.
I can also make an educated guess about the wood grain and the style that it’s made in, but just having a piece of authentic, original mid-century furniture in the house, even a deconstructed headboard pressed up against the wall by a modern bed frame, is doing something to up the mid-century quality of my home, certainly in that room, it’s bringing in more wood grain that I’d be hard pressed to find in a modern reproduction piece.
And like, as I said most so many times, the old growth forest products that were used in that day, in every everyday small town factory, no name, non-designer furniture shop, is almost unattainable for love or money in today’s materials, it’s got the patina of the house the right age. And even though that particular guest bedroom was to my horror and sorrow, updated by the previous owner, from the original amber Shellac, fine grain pine trim to what he thought of as fancier 80s replacement oak. Oh, bless his heart. I’m, there’s, this is a day of so many anecdotes. Anyway, I met him at a party at a neighbor’s house shortly after buying the house, and he wanted to tell me all about the improvement he’d made. Improvement he’d made by tearing out that trim in that particular bedroom and replacing
it. I think the loose grain of this sort of cheap oak is gaudy and the stain is the wrong color for the house, but I’m probably not going to change it again anyway. I’m bringing an original mid-century walnut piece into that room. It does a lot to calm the contrast. It’s also in a darker stain, like the trim in that space.
And I also went ahead and painted the walls in that room a dark millennial gray when I moved in, because, hi, millennial, first time home buyer, I could not stop myself, and I don’t need to get around to repainting the room right now, because I have solved the problem of is it mid-century enough with furniture I got part of my parents’ bedroom set is in there, the tall dresser, a fun coverlet on the bed, the new authentic headboard and a bunch of brass tchotchkes on the walls. It’s doing what it needs to do.
So furniture has an amazing power to re authenticate. A house, if you’ve made choices in your house, in a room, if you don’t love them, or if you’re living in a mid-century house that had an even coat of thick white landlord’s special white paint applied to every surface, even the brick, all of the woodwork.
The fastest way to bring wood grain back into your house is with vintage furniture and for pieces made out of wood, specifically looking for sideboards, tables, bedside tables, coffee tables, wardrobes, shift robes, any kind of storage furniture that gives you scope to have a lot of original mid-century wood grain.
When you ask people about if they could name a mid-century original bedroom set or living room set, they’re probably going to tell you bro, Hill Brasilia, or maybe lane, maybe crowler. There’s a couple people who have encouraged, I’m going to give you a source for a whole bunch more of them in a bid. But remember, you don’t really have to go for the dream. I mean, of course, you’re probably dreaming of a Broyhill Brasilia Sideboard, sure.
So am I? Oh, I once saw a little piece of that line come across Facebook worker plates for a real steal, but he didn’t have time to go track it down. And honestly, I still, I still think about it sometime. It was, it was a missed opportunity. But there are actually so many really sweet versions of great vintage stuff that do not need a name brand authentication to make them wonderful. There’s knockoffs of the great stuff too.
There’s actually, if you look into again, I’m going to point you to the resource in a moment. But the Sears 1970 Pace Setter line is a really close knock off of the design ethos of the Broyhill Brazilian line. It’s got big high arches on the faces of all the cabinet doors. It actually specifically reminds me more of a Minoru Yamasaki facade, specifically the National Life Insurance Company building in Minneapolis. It just looks like they replicated that facade onto the Sears Pace Setter line, and that itself is a little bit of a knockoff of the concept of the Broyhill Brasilia line, because it’s basically a direct translation of architecture into furniture.
The designers of that line went to Brasilia, the new built capital of Brazil, and took almost one to one transitions of the Oscar Niemeyer design of that city. You can see the sort of one to one comparison of the Brasilia coffee table from the Cathedral of Brasilia and from the sort of pattern the big arching H’s on the credenzas from the structure of the Niemeyer designed shooting arch pieces in its column structures.
So this is definitely worth having a look at the one to one go. Have a Google for Brasilia design city, Oscar Niemeyer and the Breuer Hill Brasilia furniture line, you will see that direct one to one connection, but you’ll find similar things in all of the mid-century furniture pieces designed by small town manufacturers all over America.
The playful ways that they’re using veneer surfaces. They’re adding in curves. They’re sort of twisting the take on handle or fasteners or openings or joinery. This is the fun they’re really getting somewhere by the way. Yes, I did say veneer. Veneer is our friend in mid-century furniture. This trips up a lot of people. They are afraid that mid-century furniture is only worth if it’s worth something, if it’s solid wood, but actually very little mid-century furniture has solid wood finishes. The very fact that its veneer is how those pieces get the really light, fine wood grain, it’s because they’re not cutting straight through each ring of a tree, even an old growth one.
They’re slicing around the ring as it ripples. They’re inwardly spiraling, getting ring after ring in close succession. And that very densely patterned grain in plywood, the veneer taken from the outer circumference of old growth pine, teak or walnut, is what we have come to associate with the beautiful patterns of wood and cabinetry and mid-century homes in wall panels, in cabinet finishes, in furniture.
Veneer is not a bad word in mid-century furniture, and neither, by the way, is plywood. Let’s circle back on the Eames bent wood designs. No one would say that the Eames armchair is a cheap product, just because it’s made with plywood. Similarly, Frank Lloyd Wright worked a lot with ply in earlier styles, earlier eras, eras of furniture solidity was the goal. Although, to be fair, furniture designers have been using thin covers and veneer and inlay marquetry for basically all of time for decorative purposes, but in original mid-century pieces, veneer is the goal clever use of modern technology.
Don’t let feeling traumatized by your first piece of IKEA flat pack that you picked up after college and the way that it fell apart prejudice you against good quality mid-century veneer furniture. Um. Yeah. Okay, so I promised a minute ago a good reference source for finding non high end brands of mid-century furniture lines, and where you’re going to want to go for this is bostonmcm.com.
They are, as you might expect from the name, a Boston based mid-century furniture store, but on their website, they’ve got a pull down tab called Vintage ads and catalogs where they have just organized original newspaper and magazine ads for all of these great original lines of mid-century furniture, even if you’re not on the hunt, go over and have a look at this website. Poke through some of the options.
This is such a fun resource to read through the advertising literature, to check out some of the pretty lines, and if you have some, as far as you’re aware, nameless pieces of mid-century, sideboard, coffee table, whatnot, furniture that you’ve picked up in antique stores or from other people, this might be a place to track down where they originally came from, who was their original source.
So that could be really fun. Again, you can start with the Brea Hill Brasilia collection. Let’s do that. It is undoubtedly cool. So I’ll link to this in my show notes, and it’s absolutely worth checking out. I also had some fun sourcing a couple of different arrays, ranges of mid-century furniture pieces to sketch up and add to the blog post for this episode.
So go check that out. Don’t hesitate to go away from name brand options or to mix and match. I think if you have a hesitance to get a vintage bed frame, for example, you can get a modern bed frame and put a vintage headboard in front of it If you hesitate to sit on a mid-century vintage sofa, if that just does not feel a comfortable way to sit and put your feet up, you can always source a modern piece of mid-century ish furniture for the living room and then surround it With end table, side table, sideboard bookshelf in a vintage line that isn’t going to you don’t have to sit on it.
It’s just going to be a beautiful object you get to look at and appreciate the fine grain, the stain, the patina of age and, to be perfectly honest, the veneer.
What a perfect lead into our mid-century house feature of the week, which is slab front cabinets. By the way, I’m still working my way through last year’s mid mod madness for features, because I started this process less than a year ago, but I’m going to be transitioning into this year’s mid mod madness at some point.
And if you aren’t following along, head over to my Instagram story pretty much anytime this week and start voting on your favorite mid-century house features of the past. The matchups are going along. I think we should getting be getting into round two around Thursday. It takes a while to get through the first round, but if you’ve missed any of it, you can find all of it in a highlight on my Instagram account.
It’s pretty fun to see how the voting turns out. Definitely make up your own mind before you tap on the poll page, because the results are posted for past stories anyway. Please come vote.
I would love to hear your opinions and get them added into the mix, and we will address the all-around winner for next year’s Well, for this year’s mid mod madness by the end of the month, let’s talk though now about a feature from last year’s mid mod madness. The slab front cabinet door is an absolute essential of mid-century style, and this is right back to our plywood, to our veneer.
If you’re looking at an original mid-century kitchen, those slab style doors are plywood. You can actually see the edges of the plies wrapping around the nicely routed edges of your classic mid-century build a grade ranch cabinet door that makes them no less good in quality. They are beautiful objects, and plywood itself is a pretty amazing feat of technology the developing of being able to slice off these thin pieces of wood and then interlay them at cross angles to each other, glue them tightly, permanently, adhere them to each other, made a whole new stability in wood products that hadn’t existed before.
The reason that older styles of cabinet doors and doors and windows themselves are made of component pieces is because we needed to have some ability for the wood itself to swell and shrink in variability of humidity and temperature. So if you look at a classic six panel door in a mid-century house where someone went through and did a flip sweep and they got a bunch of cheap Home Depot doors with fake sick panels, this drives me nuts, but a real six panel door has three key components.
It’s got horizontal and vertical edge pieces. The horizontal ones are called rails, the top rail, the mid rail, the bottom rail, and the two ones on the sides, or if there’s an intermediate one, are called styles, vertical pieces, and then panels set in between them. They’re all meant to have a little bit of float.
The panels, particularly our tongue and groove set into the rail and style pieces so that they could all expand and contract to create a functional door that wouldn’t swell up and jam sometimes. But with the advent of modern plywood technology, we no longer needed those pieces, and now suddenly we could show off a clean sweep of beautiful wood grain across the whole the width of a regular door, a slab door in your house, or the width of a cabinet door or a drawer front.
And this also gives us the ability to do grain matching, so that the grain pattern continues from one door to another to another, from the drawers just below the counter height down to the doors underneath them. This gives such a continuity to the whole space of kitchen, and it really gives us you an opportunity, maybe the best opportunity, in the house, in some places, to appreciate those subtle, really dense wood grain patterns that you get from mid-century plywood, plywood made from old growth pine doesn’t have to be fancy.
They don’t have to be walnut to be beautiful. Now these days, pine trees are not what they were. They’re younger, they’re smaller, they’re faster grown, so a good quality slab front kitchen cabinet set in a modern update would probably be slab front walnut. But don’t shy away from the concept of it being a walnut veneer. That does not mean it is poor quality. If it’s wrapping, if it’s a walnut printed image wrapped over MDF, like, yeah, that’s not a great quality. But a veneer laid over top a plywood panel is not a poor quality object.
It is, in fact, very mid-century appropriate. One question I get all the time is that people generally, if you get far enough into mid-century, you know, you’re not supposed to go with the Shaker door style. That is the most simple and minimalist option that was available other than slab doors for quite a long time. But these days, I’m getting a lot of people asking me, is slim shaker profile, the mid-century equivalent of shaker profile.
No, no, it’s not. It’s simply a contemporary trend. It’s cute in certain cases. I don’t object to it per se in any house, but I certainly would never recommend it for a mid-century kitchen cabinet for a mid-century bathroom cabinet for built ins anywhere in a mid-century house, precisely because of how cool and fun, and now it feels that timeliness means it will be trendy. It is not timeless. And what you’re looking for in a mid-century house is something that feels like it might have always been there, or if it wasn’t.
If you’re sure the kitchen was remodeled because it has a more contemporary floor plan than most original mid-century houses, you can’t quite tell when is it a really great quality 80s or 90s remodel? Was it just done five years ago? Maybe 20 it’s hard to tell, because the choices that slab front cabinet, that beautiful wood, grain, the grain matching that goes from cabinet to cabinet to cabinet, all of that continuity feels authentic to the original style of the house.
For anyone who’s lucky enough to have their original mid-century cabinets, their built in doors and drawers, hang onto them if you can, even if you can’t repurpose them into the kitchen itself, think about making wall art, smaller pieces of furniture. If the rest of your cabinets are ending up in a landfill, I hope they’re not, but if they are, see what you can preserve of them, because those original pieces of mid-century slab cabinet or actual doors are it’s hard to say that they’re worth something, because they’re only worth something to the right person.
But they are worthy. They are irreplaceable. They are something you want to hang on to if you possibly can. So let’s hear it for slab front cabinet doors, whether new, modern replacements from a good, good cabinet shop today, or the kind crafted by the guys on site, installing all of the component pieces of your mid-century house with one skill set.
These are a feature, not a bug. They are a wonderful thing. Their simplicity is their strength, and they give us an opportunity to appreciate woodgrain at its finest. So let’s wrap up, as I think you’ve gathered from this episode, anytime can be the right time to start looking for your next fun piece of mid-century furniture.
You can go out and hunt for them by checking listings for estate sales regularly drooling your local antique mall, road tripping to meet someone in the edge of the state for a perfect Facebook marketplace find, whenever you have a little free time, it’s a good opportunity to be on the lookout for something great at a good price for you.
And frankly, the hunt for the perfect piece of furniture will be catalyzed by knowing where it goes now, but also where it could go when you’ve achieved your five year plan of a better open connection between the kitchen and dining room, a newly expanded owner’s suite that’s got room for a full bedroom set that you can save parts of now and store but install all of them later, or a small addition off the back of.
Going to make the perfect spot for a new, comfy joybird sofa with matching, complimentary Lane sideboard coffee table set. Do you want to get started on that five year plan? Do you want to get started on putting your master plan together? If so, I’m here to help, and now is a great time to begin. We’ve just gotten through spring break, and I know the year feels young, but from a contractor’s perspective, it is filling up fast. Any small projects you want to get done this year probably need to get on the books ASAP.
And bigger goals for the house may already be a next year project, but if you want to be at the head of the queue, start making those connections soon. If you’ve listened to the mid mod remodel podcast at all, you know that you don’t actually want to take on those small projects without your big picture plan in hand anyway.
So reach out as soon as you can to start your master plan process, like I said at the top of the episode, now is actually a super time to get started, because we’ve got a little gap in our schedule for someone to get started right away, and I’m going to have a little less time in the month of April to schedule those starter discovery calls as we get further into the month.
So now is a great time to get on the schedule as always. If you’re looking for help creating a mid-century master plan of your own, you might want a little hand holding in the form of a 30 minute consultation call. You can find out how to do that on our website, mid mod midwest.com/call, or you might want to follow my step by step guide to preparing a great plan for your mid-century remodel using the ready to remodel program.
You can watch the free master class that will tell you all about that program again on the website. Find all of this at the show notes page, mid mod midwest.com/ 2012 or shoot me an Instagram DM to start the conversation. By the way, if you’ve got any fun stories about your favorite mid-century furniture, find I also want to know about those on Instagram.
So tell me your mid-century furniture, war stories, your successes, your near misses. I will cheer or commiserate with you. I want to hear them all. That’s it for today. Catch you next week, mid mod remodeler.