
These pieces are now icons of the midcentury movement, wildly collectible and highly prized. Together they created the Klismos line of furniture, with special care taken over the reproduction of the Klismos chair created in many wood finishes and metals. My personal favourite revival, however, was the one directed in 1960 by T H Robsjohn Gibbings, who met a Greek cabinet-making couple, the Saridis. At the turn of the 20th century, the Villa Kerylos in the South of France led the fashion again for Grecian-inspired interiors, and the Klismos hit the scene once again. The chair fell out of fashion for hundreds of years however, during the second neoclassical revival, it returned with great aplomb, dressing the drawing rooms and salons of all fashionable society from the 1780s till the late 1830s. It was first seen in 5th-century BC depictions of the furniture on vases and bas reliefs and later in similar views on Roman pottery and etchings. The Klismos Chair is undoubtedly one of the design world’s most iconic pieces, having been reintroduced into interiors repeatedly for more than a thousand years, starting with its great ancient Greek beginnings. You can still set your coffee mug upon a Table IKB – although we’d recommend a coaster. Yet, unlike fine art, design is a medium where form almost always follows function. (The work now sits in MoMA.) Two years later, after the artist’s death, his widow shepherded a coffee table filled with the same ultramarine pigment to market, based on the late artist’s prototype. In 1961, Klein painted a canvas with International Klein Blue, a colour he invented himself. Some of them are akin to priceless works of art. Their answers ranged from the simple farm table to Gaetano Pesce’s Space Age-esque Up chair. George Nelson’s collection for Herman Miller, for example, created the template for cubicles, now omnipresent in office buildings.īut what are the pieces that have not only entered our homes but our collective consciousness? Vogue asked 22 interior designers and professionals to find out. It dictates how we interact with our surrounding spaces, how we go about our daily lives, even during the most mundane moments. If a painting is meant to be looked at and fashion meant to be worn, furniture is meant to be lived in – slept in, worked in, sat in. Sometimes, a piece of furniture comes along and changes everything around us.
