Post War Atomic-Age Interiors
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Architectural historians generally identify 1933 as the year mid-century modern design began in America. Certainly, the concepts that later influenced mid-century design began in the 1930s, more in Europe than in the U.S. They did not really flower until the end of the World War stimulated the demand for affordable housing on a massive scale.
The Post-War Series: Where Are You Now?
Post-war housing featured "minimalist" interiors, devoid of unnecessary ornamentation, and focused squarely on function.
New materials, many the products of wartime development such as most plastics and engineered wood products, dramatically influenced mid-century designers.
Advances in technology and scarcity fueled the transition from a heavy emphasis on natural materials during the prior Arts & Crafts period to engineered materials.
Plastics such as vinyl, Plexiglas, and Lucite were celebrated in post-war design for their own qualities, rather than as an imitator of other materials such as wood or stone. Plywood replaced native wood in door construction and tile and stone gave way to Formica® high-density laminate as the preferred countertop matrial.
Plain doors and windows, minimal trim, if any, and unadorned walls contributed to the "vanilla" look of the period.
Gypsum Drywall Comes of Age
It was invented in 1916 by Sackett Plaster Company (a subsidiary of United States Gypsum Corporation (USG)) and originally called Sacket Board.
It was promoted as a fire-resistant replacement for wet plaster that was quick and easy to install. Acceptance of the new material was slow in coming, however. USG renamed the material to the catchier in an attempt to draw more attention to the product.
Plaster had been the standard wall treatment for hundreds of years and homebuilders, conservative by nature, were reluctant to adopt the unfamiliar material.
Builders flirted with the material throughout the 1920s and -30s but its use in residential construction was very limited depite heavy promotion byh USG.
What turned the tide to almost universal adoption, however, were the many disadvantages of wet plaster in the feverish world of post-war homebuilding.
Traditional plaster was time-consuming to install and required highly skilled labor. Plasterers often apprenticed for a decade before they were considered to have mastered the craft, and they were not afraid to charge for their hard-earned skill.
Its long curing time was also seen as an impediment. Wet plaster required weeks and sometimes months of drying before a wall could be painted. In the fast-paced Post-war housing boom plaster slowed progress to a crawl for weeks at a time.
Drywall, by contrast, could be installed and finished, ready to paint, in two or three days.
In the end, even reluctant builders were forced by competitive pressures to adopt the new wall system to save both time and money, and in the 1950s it became the standard in most of the country.
The Holdouts
Certain areas of the county still hold wet plaster in high esteem, notably the upper Mid-Atlantic states and New England. However, today's wet plaser is usually applied over a gypsum backerboard rather than lath.
The guys at This Old House disagree vehemently.
Retro Interior Moldings
Wet plaster walls necessarily included large gaps and required wide moldings to conceal the gaps.
Accordingly, moldings in the Victorian and Arts & Crafts periods were wide and thick, up to 9" wide and 1" thick. Made mostly of various hardwoods, they were usually varnished to emphasize the figure of the wood. Softwoods like pine were used only in utility rooms and were usually painted
Gypsum drywall eliminated the need for wide moldings and made some trim totally unnecessary. Crown molding, for example, needed with wet plaster to hide potential cracks where walls met ceilings, was no needed no longer.
Picture rail was also banished. Needed to hang pictures on plaster walls into which a nail could not be easily driven without rock boring tools, it was made rdundant by gypsum drywall on which pictures could be hung directly.
Designers and architects retained only the absolutely essential moldings – baseboard along with window and door casings. Some builders eliminated even this minimal room trim.
In part, the change was stylistic, but it was also necessary, Clear, knot-free, hardwood for trim and moldings was getting scarcer, harder to come by, and much more expensive.
Old-growth forests had been largely depleted by 1945.
Gumwood, popular in inexpensive trim and moldings in the 1920s and '30s had been almost used up. It is still so rare and expensive that it is cataloged and sold as a hardwood, even though it is anything but.
Old-growth pine was also largely gone. Only in the American West was suitable molding still available in the form of Douglas Fir, but the large old-growth fir trees would be gone by 1970.
Plantation trees – trees grown as a commercial crop – barely existed and the extensive replanting that has since provided molding-grade lumber was still in its infancy.
Builders turned to finger-jointed pine, a manufactured product made by joining small pieces of pine boards with modern adhesives. Stained, the joints were visible, so paint became the finish of choice.
Narrow and relatively thin, minimalist trim became the new standard.
Finder-Jointed Molding
Finger-jointed moldings made the most cost-efficient use of limited Post-War supplies of clear pine and Douglas fir for moldings. Its drawback is that it cannot be stained and varnished – finger joints are visible under stain – so it must be painted.Baseboards were eventually reduced to 3⅝" with a thickness of ⅜" – the current standard. Door and window casings were standardized at 2-¼".
The decorative function of moldings was de-emphasized. They were often painted the same color as the wall on which they were installed to make them nearly invisible.
Some architects eliminated wood trim completely, creating a "reveal" where walls joined floors in which a recess at the bottom of the wall marks the transition rather than wood trim.
At windows, gypsum drywall was "returned" to make a recess for the opening that made wood trim unnecessary.
Not only was the result minimalistic but it was faster to build and less expensive, traits that appealed to post-war builders.
Atomic Age Doors – From Panel to Slab
Until the last half of the 20th century, doors were made of boards usually in some form of panel door in which one or more central panels are held in a frame.
This configuration produced a very stable door that did not expand and contract seasonally. The durability of these doors is legendary. One frame and panel door in a cathedral in Italy dates to the 6th century and is till in daily use.
Better technology, however, made frame-and-panel doors obsolete almost overnight.
New and more powerful adhesives made possible the durable slab door, fabricated from pressure-laminated wood.
These were direct inheritors of the stressed-panel technologies used to build plywood PT boats and lightweight aircraft for the war effort.
A honeycomb of wood (later cardboard) strips supported two thin plywood panels. Wood blocks strategically located to support hinges and latches made the doors as strong and reliable as panel doors.
Doors were pre-hung in their frames at the factory, making them faster to install using only semi-skilled labor. In the 1930s a skilled carpenter was expected to hang six to eight interior doors in an eight-hour day. By 1950 a team of two specialist "trimmers" could set four prehung doors in an hour.
While the panel-look door still survives, these are often not actual panel doors. They are pressure-laminated plywood or plastic shells over a honeycomb mesh – essentially slab doors with an embossed design.
The same process is used to make exterior doors using steel or fiberglass shells shaped to look like panel doors with an interior of insulating foam – far more energy-efficient than even the best panel door.
Retro Colors, Paint, and Wallpaper
Exuberance characterized the immediate post-war years.
The Great Depression was gone, the deadliest war was in history was won. America was once again thriving and the post-war economy was booming.
The excitement was reflected in the bold color palette of period.
The muted earth tones of the Arts & Crafts period were replaced with vibrant pastels and vibrant colors to create a palette unique to the time.
Pastels such as pink, rose, turquoise, mint green, lemon yellow, and robin's egg blue were daringly comingled with the deeper hues of "sunny day" yellow, electric blue, very orange, and fire-engine
red to produce color combinations never before seen in interior decoration.
Only at the very end of the period did more muted colors influenced by nature regain some of their earlier popularity. These included brown, cream, gray, and green, leading to the mid-1960s in which Harvest Gold and Avocado Green became the must-have
colors for kitchen appliances.
Although this vibrant color palette is indelibly associated with mid-century modern decor, it actually originated 30 years earlier in the middle to late Arts & Crafts era.
As early as the 1920s were premiering many of these same hues in full-color magazine advertisements.
While Arts & Crafts houses usually featured muted colors taken from nature, kitchens and bathrooms were a frequent exception – brightly painted with colorful wallpaper very similar to that found in post-war kitchens and baths decades later.
Wallpaper, deemphasized during the Arts & Crafts period, found new life in post-war in the bright colors and bold patterns that better reflected an resurgent America.
In most homes of the period, colorful and richly figured wallpaper was considered the main feature of a room's decor rather than the backdrop against which the room's decor was displayed. It was common to use wallpaper on just one "accent wall" of a room with coordinating paint everywhere else.
Pastels combined with large, bold patterned prints were particularly favored as were small geometric patterns in vibrant colors. Even where the colors were somewhat muted, the patterns were bold and distinct.
Post-War Mid-Century Flooring
The Levitt brothers, the most prolific builders of the mid-century period, preferred resilient asphalt tile flooring for their Levittown houses, set directly onto the concrete slab floor over radiant heat.
Unfortunately, the asphalt tile of the time became brittle over time and eventully began to crack. By the mid-1950s the Levitts and most other builders has transitioned to vinyl floor coverings.
Natural and Engineered Wood Flooring
Outside of Levitt communities, especially where the house was set over a basement, the favored flooring material was stained and varnished oak often in the form of parquet tiles or herringbone patterns rather than parallel strips or planks more common both before and after the mid-century period.
Parquet and herringbone patterns could be made up of even very short strips of lumber, making more efficient use of increasingly scarce hardwood.
But, it was also more time-consuming to install, and the words "time" and "consuming" were an anathema to Post-War homebuilders.
Wood flooring manufacturers solved the labor problem by combining strips into engineered flooring tiles or blocks that installed very quickly.
Typically a two-person flooring team could install, sand, and varnish the flooring for an entire house in two or three days, then return and apply the final varnish coat a few days later.
Pre-finished flooring made this process even faster. An entire house could be "floored" in a single day and walked on the next.
Ceramic Tile Flooring
In warmer climates, ceramic tile was commonly used throughout the house. This was especially the case of Southern California and the Southwest where a Spanish influence is dominant.
Eichler homes, in particular, made extensive use of ceramic tile in every room of the house, often with hydronic radiant heating underneath, then estended it into the atrium helping to tie incoor and outdoor spaces together.
In not-so-warm areas, ceramic tile flooring was favored for wet areas such as bathrooms and entries for its very high resistance to water damage.
Tile in Post-War bathrooms was particularly colorful. In entries and living areas, however, it was likely to be more muted, with neutrals and earth colors dominating, a tendency that grew as the period wore on.
By the end of the era around 1965, almost all ceramic tile was steadfastly neutral and had even returned to the various shades of white common in earlier architectural periods.
Vinyl Flooring
Early resilient tile made from asphalt and asbestos was popular from the 1920s. It was low-cost, easy to install, and resisted abrasion and moisture, but grew brittle over time. Its range of colors was narrow and tended to be dark due to the inherent limitations of the material.
It was replaced during the mid-century with vinyl tile which was brighter, more colorfut, and retained its flexibility over time.
Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) was not a new material. It had been discovered in the 19th century by a French physician.
But it was not until 1926 that an American research chemist named Waldo Semon invented a plasticized version that was flexible, but not adhesive. Stickiness was a serious limitation of earlier formulations.
As flooring, it was introduced to the public at the Century of Progress Exhibition in Chicago in 1933 but received only modest attention during a period in which most homeowners preferred natural flooring materials such as linoleum, cork, or wood.
The World War accelerated its development to replace materials made scarce by the war, primarily rubber.
It blossomed in the 1950s once it began to be manufactured in Europe and North America on an industrial scale, and largely supplanted asphalt tiles as well as true linoleum in the kitchens and bathrooms of the period.
Mid-century decorators took full advantage of its design potential.
Vinyl could be brightly colored and mid-century colors were bold, varied, and commonly set in patterns that were even bolder and more varied – often in contrasting color combinations seldom seen since.
Wall-To-Wall Carpeting…
By 1960 wall-to-wall carpeting was the sought-after flooring and by 1965 was almost universal in new housing.
In the early post-war period, wall-to-wall carpeting was an option available to new home buyers. If the homeowner selected carpet, it was commonly laid over a brand-new, never-walked-on wood floor.
We have been often pleasantly surprised to find an almost pristine wood floor under the old, shaggy carpet we remove in post-war housing renovations.
Later in the period, it was installed over a plywood or medium density fiberboard subfloor.
… and the Vacuum Cleaner
Wall-to-wall carpeting gained in popularity only as the vacuum cleaner became affordable.
Loose rugs and carpets could be removed for cleaning by hanging them on a clothesline and beating them vigorously to remove all dirt and dust. (See "A Fully Qualified Rug Beater" for more information.)
But wall-to-wall carpeting, attached to the floor, had to be cleaned in situ. And that required a vacuum cleaner.
The modern portable suction vacuum cleaner was invented by a janitor, James Murray Spangler, an asthmatic, who was looking for a way to reduce dust that flew into the air when his wife swept the floors of his house.
He partnered with William Henry Hoover to form the Electric Suction Sweeper Company, in 1908.[1] By 1920 the company was assembling and selling patented vacuum cleaners in Canada, Britain and several other countries in Europe.
In 1936 Hoover introduced its iconic Model 150 upright sweeper, designed by Henry Dreyfuss, the permier product designer of his era. Dreyfus was a leading proponent of streamlined design. His rounded, aerodynamic forms were widely copied and increasingly shaped 1930s appliances. He also pioneered "human factor" designing, a discipline to be later named "ergonomics."
To reduce weight, the 150's chasis was made from magnesium. A Bakelite cover concealed its inner workings and an headlight permited Mom to clearly see what she was vacuuming.
The 150 became the model for future Hoover uprights, many of which are still working, some after over 100 years of service.
The upright Hoover with the "Beats...as it Sweeps...as it Cleans" beater bar closely duplicated rug beating to loosen and then vacuum up any debris embedded in the carpet (and scare the bejeezus out of the cat).
By the post-war years, the price had dropped to the point where a vacuum was no longer a household luxury purchase.
Electrolux and Kirby, beginning about 1925, sold their vacuums door-to-door. According to Electrolux:
"A display of the Electrolux vacuum cleaner in your own home, preferably in the evening when the husband was also home, was central to the sales concept. Not only did this give the salesman a chance to display the product. It also gave him a chance to see how it was used in the home…"
Eletrolux discontinued door-to-door sales in 1965, but Kirby still schedules in-home demonstations for prospective buyers.
The problem with carpet, however, is that even with regular vacuuming and occasional steam cleaning, it is never really clean.
It harbors whole battalions of pathogens as well as dust mites, pet dander, insect droppings, and mold spores that a vacuum cleaner only slightly inconveniences and even steam cleaning fails to entirely eradicate.
The American Lung Association strongly recommends against rugs and carpets for just these health concerns.
Carpeting has now fallen out of favor but it had a good run.
It was the dominant floor covering until the 1990s when prefinished natural and engineered wood floors and laminated plank flooring made installing a wood or wood-look strip floor a lot easier, cheaper, and much less messy.
Atomic Age Furnishings
The furnishings of the Arts & Crafts period in the first half of the 20th century, pioneered by proponents such as Gustav Stickley, favored the use of well-figured wood, simple finishes and the "structural honesty" of exposed joinnery.
The genre emphasized the figure of the wood as the primany decorative element rather than the applied embelishments typical of the Victorian era.
Particleboard
Particleboard or pressed board, considered an inferior material today, was a designer material in the 1950s, and designers pushed its potential to the limit.
Invented by German engineer and Luftwaffe pilot Max Himmelheber in 1932, it was first mass-produced in Germany where wood had become scarce during the 2nd World War.
Torfit Werke AG in Bremen, Germany, was the first factory to produce the material (as "pressed wood" Ger: Pek-Pressholz). It reportedly manufactured 10 tons per day in the early 1940s, including formed moldings as well as flat panels.
After the war, the technology migrated to the U.S. and Canada but was not in wide use until the 1960s when it became the mainstay of cheap, mass-produced furniture and lost much of its earlier allure among designers of upscale furniture.
Mid-century designers moved away from the primitive, hand-crafted look of Arts & Crafts furniture to still very simple but highly functional, more sophisticated, and largely ergonomic furniture styles in which the design itself was the principal decorative element.
The Bauhaus Effect
The Staatliches Bauhaus (literally: "state building house") universally known as the Bauhaus was arguably the most influential design and architecture school of the 20th century.
Its outsized impact still underpins much of modern product design even into the 21st century.
Under the guidance of architect Walter Gropius, Bauhaus teachers and students embarked on a voyage of design discovery that lasted just 14 years but would change forever the face and direction of modern architecture, furniture design, and interior decor.
The curriculum emphasized the merger of design with industrial arts. Students were taught to create designs that could easily be mass-produced.
Pragmatism with an emphasis on simplicity and austerity was the core of its design philosophy the credo of which was "form follows function".
Applied ornamentation of any kind was shunned as was anything else that did not contribute to an object's "essential purpose."
A chair is for sitting. That's its function. It should be comfortable to sit on and contribute to the act of comfortable sitting, even for long periods. Additions, unless they enhanced this "essence of chairness," were not wanted.
Bauhaus had only a modest impact on early 20th-century design, especially outside of Germany, before the school closed in 1933 under pressure from the Nazis for being "un-German".
After its closing, the school's faculty dispersed throughout Europe and the U.S. – the Bauhaus diaspora – taking with it the Bauhaus ideals that became the foundation of post-war modernist design.
Had the school's associates stayed in Germany, it is doubtful that the Bauhaus would have had nearly the influence on post-war design that it ultimately exerted.
Walter Gropius emigrated to England, then to the U.S. where he joined the faculty at Harvard University.
Mies van der Rohe, the Bauhaus School's last director, became the dean of the College of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, the first institution in the U.S. to offer a Ph.D. in product and industrial design.
Bauhaus artist Josef Albers became the head of the Department of Design at Yale University. His pedagogical innovations became the basis of modern art education programs in the U.S.
László Moholy-Nagy settled in the U.K. for a few years before moving to the U.S. where he established the School of Design in Chicago that later became part of the Illinois Institute of Technology.
Marcel Breuer, a Hungarian-born architect and industrial designer followed Walter Gropius to Harvard. He opened an office in New York in 1946 and became one of the most sought-after architects at the peak of 20th-century design.
He was responsible for two of the most enduring chair designs of the mid-century, the Wassily Chair and the Cesca Chair, both recognized as "among the 10 most important chairs of the 20th century."
The New Materials
New materials, notably plastics and laminated wood panels, many developed during the World War for military use, made sweeping curves possible through industrial molding rather than labor-intensive and time-consuming craft shop carving and shaping.
Furniture, especially the chair, was reimagined by designers such as Charles & Ray Eames, Arne Jacobsen[2], and Eero Saarinen using shapes that better fit the human body.
Where earlier chairs demanded an upright, formal posture, chair designs of the 1940s and '50s encouraged lounging
in a relaxed posture, often in a semi-reclining position.
The Eames Lounger and Saarinen's Tulip chair were to become design icons, still in production after nearly 100 years.
Traditional materials declined in influence but did not go away.
Wood remained the first choice for case-making, although often in the form of an engineered product such as plywood or particleboard rather than lumber in its natural state.
Engineered panels encouraged period designers to adopt rectangular patterns for casework such as chests, dressers, desks, sideboards, and to a lesser extent, for tables.
Mid-Century Casework
Rectangular panels were easier and cheaper to fabricate in a factory setting than curved or rounded elements that require extra processing.
If turned elements were used – table legs, for example – they were very plain and simple to produce using semi-automated lathes.
Teak was favored by the Scandinavian school of design, so much so that most Asian teak forests were depleted by the 1980s.
Today's teak is primarily plantation-grown in Asia and South America.Rosewood, mahogany, and walnut were also featured furniture woods in the 1950s. Birch, although in widespread use for doors and moldings, did not migrate to furnishings in any significant way.
Finishes were light and airy. In part, this was a reflection of the light-hearted mood of Post-War buyers. But it was also a revolt against the dark-hued wood finishes of the prior Arts & Crafts and Victorian periods.
Arts & Crafts furnishings, in particular, tended to be dark and somber. The oak furniture manufactured by Gustaf Stickley was often so dark as to be almost black.
Other Arts & Crafts designers such as Limbert, Mackintosh, and the Greene brothers likewise favored well-figured wood richly finished in somber hues.
For more information on Arts & Crafts furnishings, see Arts & Crafts Interiors The First Comfortable House.
The swing by designers of the mid-century to the other end of the finish spectrum was a deliberate rejection of darker hues which they considered dreary and depressing.
Lighter-colored woods were preferred to traditional darker species: white oak over red oak and walnut sapwood over darker heartwood.
Rosewood from Honduras was preferred over its Brazilian cousin due to its lighter tone. Teak from Myanmar and Indonesia was favored for its pale and even coloration.
The wood was rarely stained except to emphasize grain. It was left its natural color.
Mid-Century Interior Styles
Some of the more faddish post-war decorating trends came and went quickly.
Remember Campaign furniture and the (best forgotten) Mediterranean style?
Both appeared and disappeared in about five years, leaving virtually no trace that they ever were – although campaign furniture is making a comeback with some vintage pieces selling for several thousand dollars.
But, the nice thing about mid-century houses is that they can adapt to just about any interior styling. They are extremely basic and, therefore, flexible.
While fussy Victorian may look out of place, colonial houses lend themselves well to traditional early-American styles including Chippendale, Sheraton, and Federal furniture designs.
What are termed the "modernist" styles can be freely used. These include art nouveau, art deco,and Scandinavian.
Art Nouveau & Art Deco Influences
Art Nouveau ("New Art" in English) originated in the late 19th century as the French version of the Arts & Crafts movement.
It was the first widely popular design movement of the 20th century, conceived as a "new style for a new century," With a focus on decorative and applied arts.
Like most Arts & Crafts motifs, it was linspired by nature. Its goal was less clutter and cleaner lines in a forceful rejection of the busy fussiness of late Victorian-age design.
Its primary characteristic was the extensive use of curves and free-flowing lines, particularly evident in furnishings.
Art Nouveau greatly influenced architecture but never became an architectural type in its own right.
It was more an interior design motif with some fairly characteristic features including a preference for hardwood flooring and a palette of soft colors: grays, soft yellows, browns, olives, and lilacs.
By the 1930s Art Nouveau had morphed into the Art Deco movement that lasted in somewhat muted form until the 1970s.
Art Deco was very popular in the 1930s as an architectural style not so much for homes as for public and commercial buildings. The genre gave period movie theaters their characteristic look.
It was the overarching style of the Chrysler and Empire State buildings and Rockefeller Center. The Golden Gate Bridge is an Art Deco-inspired structure as is the Nebraska State Capitol building, the only Art Deco state capitol.
Unlike Art Nouveau which favored curves and free-flowing lines, Art Deco emphasized precise geometric shapes and forms using parallel straight lines, zigzags, chevrons, and stylized floral motifs.
It represented industrialism, technology, and speed. The first "streamlined" locomotives and automobiles were inspired by and included Art Deco elements.
It also owed a largely unacknowledged debt to the traditional patterns used in Native American aboriginal art particularly of the Pueblo and Navaho region.
The style favored bold use of color in carpets and accessories and made extensive use of novel Post-War materials including aluminum, stainless steel, and plastics while retaining some Art Nouveau materials, such as glass, in both interior detail and furnishings.
Both Art Nouveau and Art Deco, although often somewhat muted, fit well inside post-war houses.
The tone of a room was conveyed chiefly through its rugs and furnishings rather than its architectural elements which were deliberately kept bland as a neutral backdrop.
Interior walls were typically monochromattic to keep the look clean and crisp while furniture and accessories were finished in rich colors with strong stylized shapes.
A comfortable sofa, at least one club or lounge chair, and a coffee table are almost required elements of the Art Nouveau or Art Deco living room.
Scandinavian Modernism
Called by many names, the most common being "Danish Modern", no style captured the post-war American spirit quite like Scandinavian Modernism, a celebration of simple, uncomplicated designs, minimalism, and functionality.
The style was an extension of the European Arts & Crafts movement developed by Scandinavian designers such as Kaare Klint, Herman Gesellius, and Armas Lindgren but was also fertilized by ideas from other countries.
Designers such as the Americans, Charles and Ray Eames, Charles Le Corbusier of France and the German Bauhaus School made full use of the possibilities of new materials such as bendable plywoods and moldable plastics to design furnishings with sweeping curves.
Kaare Klint, in particular, was very influential in stamping a Danish look and feel to the Norse version of Arts & Crafts.
His special interest was seating, and he designed a great many chairs from 1914 to 1936, most of which are still available.
Klint's painstakingly researched designs were based on the positions and functions of the human body.
The use of high-quality materials joined with careful workmanship were key features of his work.
All of these traits carried over into the design school he founded in Copenhagen in 1924, and to his students whose works popularized Modernist design throughout Europe and the Americas.
In full flower by the late 1930s, the movement was refined during the austerity of the World War of the 1940s, a time when most imported and man-made materials became unavailable.
Scandinavian designers were forced to revert to local, native materials such as oak, birch, rush, clay, and linen cloth, most of which carried over into and reached their zenith in the Post-War period.
After the War, a few exotics slipped back in, notably teak and rosewood but the designers generally remained faithful to their wartime roots in native, natural materials and simple finishes.
Influenced by the Bauhaus design regimen, designers were schooled to create furnishings and accessories that were not just elegant and functional but also easily factory-produced in large quantities.
Scandinavian Modern Lounging Chair
Image Credit: Nikki Nyman. Teak, washable fabric, a monochromatic color scheme, and the sparse, simple decoration of the Scandinavian Modernist style fit well in minimalist mid-century modern interiors.The lower costs resulting from hig-volume manufacturing meant that the furniture was not just beautiful and functional, it was also affordable, and well within the means of a typical suburban family.
Much of it was made in Europe, a continent just recovering from the World War, where wages were half those paid to factory workers in the U.S.
Taking hold in New York City soon after the World War, the Scandinavian Modern look quickly swept all across the country, becoming the defining furniture and interior design style of the period.
Young American families found it the ideal expression of the new, informal, suburban lifestyle. The simplified lines were geometric, clean, and unpretentious and the scale was well-suited to the smaller rooms of the post-war period.
Framed seating with removable, slip cushions meant that a new look could be had at any time with some simple reupholstery.
Scandinavian furniture was lean and lightweight, making cleaning or rearranging much less burdensome.
The natural materials were a welcome counterpoint to the mass-produced, man-made materials that seem to explode into the middle of the century: plastics, nylon, Orion®, Selma®, vinyl, and Formica®, to name just a very few.
All in all, it was he perfect furniture for its time.
A lot of it was made and a lot of it still exists. Excellent examples can be found on auction sites like eBay.com and 1stDibs.
And the furniture is still being made and sold by companies like All Modern and the Danish Design Store. Custom-made furniture is available on Etsy from any number of small, innovative craftshops, much of it new designs in the Scandinavian style.
The Mid-Century Kitchen
The mid-century kitchen was in most respects a modern kitchen. It contained almost every feature of a contemporary kitchen: gas or electric range, electric refrigeration, modern plumbing, and fitted cabinetry with recesses into which appliances were neatly tucked.
Later kitchens even had early microwave ovens and automatic dishwashers – appliances not yet invented when the period began and which would not become common until the 1970s. It was sanitary and efficient .... (Continues)
Footnotes
- The Hoover vacuum The company was renamed Hoover Suction Sweeper Company afer Spangler's death in 1915.
-
The Hoover vacuum
swept
the British Isles after the World War (pun intended.). The U.K. company was formed in 1919 and opened a factory in Middlesex in 1932 to produce British Hoovers. The brand quickly became virtually synonymous with floor cleaning. "Hoovering" entered the British vernacular to meanvacuuming.
The British do not vacuum floors. They arehoovered
even when the hoovering is done using an Electrolux vacuum cleaner.
- Hoover in the U.S. is now owned by Techtronic Industries based in Hong Kong, also the owner of the Dirt Devil brand. However, in the rest of the world, the brand is owned by Haier, a Chinese appliance company that also owns GE appliances.
- Arne Jacobsen considered himself an architect, not a product or industrial designer. Almost all the products he designed were specific to one of his buildings.
- His three-legged Ant Chair that he created in 1951 for his addition to the Novo Nordisk factory in Cophagen is very likely the most successful chair design of all time. Intended to be light, stable, easy to stack, and inexpensive to mass-produce, it contains jjust two parts: a tubular steel frame and a springy plywood seat and back. The vivid colors in which the chairs are usually painted add visual interest.
- The elegant Egg and Swan chairs (1958) were also site-specific, created for the SAS Air Terminal and the Royal Hotel respectively, both in Cophagen, for which he designed nearly every element including lighting and textiles, right down to the ashtrays and silverware.
- His wall-mounted Vola 777 faucet designed for the Danish National Bank building in Cophagen, hides its working parts inside the wall. It was the first design of its kind and is one of the most widely copied of all faucet designs. The original Vola 777 faucet is still being manufactured by in Denmark.
Rev. 02/15/24