{"id":514,"date":"2025-03-19T16:47:10","date_gmt":"2025-03-19T17:47:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.camperscorner.net\/?p=514"},"modified":"2025-03-28T18:08:22","modified_gmt":"2025-03-28T18:08:22","slug":"how-coveted-midcentury-furniture-is-getting-way-more-coppable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.camperscorner.net\/index.php\/2025\/03\/19\/how-coveted-midcentury-furniture-is-getting-way-more-coppable\/","title":{"rendered":"How Coveted Midcentury Furniture Is Getting Way More Coppable"},"content":{"rendered":"
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You might not need to scour auction sites for that rare item\u2014new licensed productions from famous designers are making it easier than ever to get the real thing.<\/p>\n

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Welcome to Field Guide<\/a>, a column by Sami Reiss of Snake<\/a> covering all-time design and where you can find it.<\/i><\/p>\n

At a recent edition of Salone del Mobile in Milan, Cassina<\/a>, the Italian furniture company, debuted a light by Ray and Charles Eames<\/a> that had never been put into production before. Working behind the scenes of the release of the Galaxy, a 1949 design that Eames Office had been working on introducing since the 1980s, was Form Portfolios<\/a>, a licensing company that opened shop expressly to make designer midcentury furnishings more accessible to the era\u2019s aficionados.<\/p>\n

For that crowd, Form\u2019s efforts, along with those of legacy producers, are today creating a refreshed retail environment for historic design objects: some originally made only in small numbers, others that may have been produced at grand scale but went out of production, and, in the case of the Galaxy, those that were never created to begin with. These objects now give the vehement design lover other options besides shelling out five figures for a vintage piece, or competing against other buyers at auction in hopes of a deal on one.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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At Salone del Mobile in 2023, Cassina debuted the Galaxy light, a 1949 design by Ray and Charles Eames.<\/p>\n

Photos \u00a9 Eames Office, LLC, 2025<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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For Form\u2019s founder and CEO, Mark Masiello, seeing through the release of the Galaxy and more objects like it comes out of a “pure love for design and a desire to bring innovation to the industry,” he says. An avid furniture collector who was working in private equity, Masiello began Form, based in Rhode Island and Copenhagen, in 2017 after taking a tour of Hans Wegner<\/a>\u2019s studio. A long-time collector of Wegner\u2019s, Masiello was moved by a folder containing designs for the Wishbone chair, and dismayed by the spare fashion in which the studio was operating. “It was just one family member,” Masiello says, “part-time, three days a week.” It was clear the archive was languishing: despite Wegner\u2019s name and body of work, the family didn\u2019t know what to do.<\/p>\n

“If an artist makes music,” Masiello explains, “a music publisher manages these rights\u2014but that doesn\u2019t exist in the design world.” Or it didn\u2019t before: Form, Masiello says, has put 600-plus pieces into production by connecting families with producers. (In furniture, generally, a designer owns a design and licenses it to a furniture company, which then produces it. Myriad factors, though\u2014including the death of a designer\u2014determine whether it remains in production.) Most notably, the firm helped return Paul McCobb<\/a>\u2019s work to the market after a several-decades-long absence. While he was among the most popular designers of the 1950s and \u201960s\u2014his disarmingly simple tapered-leg chairs and desks<\/a> were often modular, and built out the midcentury home and office aesthetic\u2014times changed, and his pieces fell out of production. And over the past several years, the McCobb heirs, through Form, have returned the designer\u2019s work back into wide availability under several different makers. CB2, notably, has reintroduced several designs by McCobb, many of them from his Irwin collection and others a selection of Bowtie seating.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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Designed in 1952, Paul McCobb\u2019s C7806 coffee table from CB2 is hewn from American white oak and Arabescato marble.<\/p>\n

Photo courtesy of Form Portfolios<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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The process for bringing some of these objects to market can be lengthy. To update Eames\u2019s Helena light, originally created for a church in Arkansas<\/a>, Eames Demetrios, Ray and Charles\u2019s grandson and the Eames Office\u2019s director, says he spent 200 hours interviewing people, including churchgoers, who were close to the object in some way. Recreating other items is more straightforward: Hem<\/a>, a Finnish design brand, is responsible for a faithful remake of Yrj\u00f6 Kukkapuro<\/a>\u2019s Experiment chair. (Having debuted at Salone del Mobile in 1982, the chair itself isn\u2019t midcentury, but Kukkapuro is of that era.) On its own, Eames Office handles the creation of some of Ray and Charles\u2019s designs, like an elephant toy that was never put into production until recently. As with that instance, sometimes items are rolled out with an eye toward younger consumers, or those who are new to design. “The elephants were part of that,” says Demetrios, an “entryway into design.”<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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Photos courtesy of Hem<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

See the full story on Dwell.com: How Coveted Midcentury Furniture Is Getting Way More Coppable<\/a><\/b>
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