- Verner Panton
Verner Panton (13 February 1926 - 5 September 1998) is considered one of Denmark's most influential 20th-century furniture and interior designers. During his career, he created innovative and futuristic designs in a variety of materials, especially plastics, and in vibrant colors. His style was very "1960s" but regained popularity at the end of the 20th century; as of 2004, Panton's most well-known furniture models are still in production (at Vitra, among others).
- Alvar Aalto
Hugo Alvar Henrik Aalto was a Finnish architect and designer, sometimes called the "Father of Modernism" in the Nordic countries. His work includes architecture, furniture and glassware.
- Eileen Gray
Eileen Gray (August 9, 1878 - October 31, 1976) was an Irish lacquer artist, furniture designer and architect now well-known for incorporating luxurious lacquer work into the stark International Style aesthetic.
- Marcel Breuer
Marcel Lajos Breuer, architect and furniture designer, was an influential Hungarian-born modernist of Jewish descent. One of the fathers of Modernism, Breuer showed a great interest in modular construction and simple forms. Known as Lajkó, Breuer studied and taught at the Bauhaus in the 1920s, stressing the combination of art and technology, and eventually became the head of the school's cabinet-making shop.
- Robert
Robert (Mousey) Thompson was a British furniture maker. He lived in Kilburn, North Yorkshire, where he set up a business manufacturing oak furniture, which featured a carved mouse on almost every piece. It is claimed that the mouse trademark came about accidentally in 1919 following a conversation about "being as poor as a church mouse", which took place between Thompson and one of his colleagues during the carving of a cornice for a screen.
- Jasper Morrison
Jasper Morrison is an English product and furniture designer. Morrison was born in London, England but brought up in New York, USA. He was educated at Bryanston School. He received a Bachelor of Design degree from Kingston Polytecnic Design School in 1982 and a Masters degree in Design from the Royal College of Art, London, in 1985. He also studied at the Berlin University of the Arts, formerly the Hochschule der Künste (HdK).
- Al Capone
Alphonse Gabriel Capone (January 17, 1899 - January 25, 1947), popularly known as "Scarface" Al Capone, was an American gangster who led a crime syndicate dedicated to the illegal trafficking of alcoholic beverages during the time of prohibition in the 1920s and 1930s. Born in Brooklyn, New York, to Neapolitan emigrants Gabriele and Teresina Capone, …
- Konstantin Grcic
Konstantin Grcic was born in Munich, Germany in 1965. After training as a cabinet maker at Parnham College in England he studied Design at the Royal College of Art in London from 1988-1990. Since setting up his own design practice Konstantin Grcic Industrial Design in Munich in 1991 he has developed furniture, products and lighting for many of Europe's leading design companies. Konstantin Grcic creates industrial products widely described as pared down, simple, minimalist.
- Tony Martin
Anthony Edward Martin (born 1944) is a farmer from Norfolk, England. He is most notable for being convicted of the murder of Fred Barras, a 16-year-old burglar that he caught in his house. He was sentenced to life in prison, but his conviction was reduced on appeal to manslaughter on grounds of diminished responsibility to a five-year sentence, of which he had to serve three.
- Sam Maloof
Sam Maloof (born January 24 1916 in Chino, California) is a furniture designer and maker. His work has been displayed in museums around the United States. All his pieces are custom-made, and there is currently a several-year waiting period for customers who have placed orders. One of his rockers typically sells for about $25,000. In 1985 he was named a MacArthur Fellow. Presidents Carter and Reagan have both owned Maloof rockers.
- Rick Owens
Rick Owens, (born 1962) is an American fashion designer known for his edgy fashions favored by rock stars and people who like to cultivate an avant garde reputation. Since 2003, he has worked out of Paris where in addition to his own line, he serves as creative director for Revillon, the furrier. Born and raised in Central California (Porterville, CA), …
- Aino Aalto
Aino Aalto (born Aino Marsio; 1894-1949) was a Finnish architect and designer. She married Alvar Aalto in 1924 and with him designed furniture. In 1935 they founded Artek, a firm selling lighting fixtures and furniture. Aino Aalto also designed several glassware objects for Iittala. Her most famous glass design is still on sale, and slightly different copies made by companies such as IKEA are widespread.
- Kaare Klint
Kaare Klint (Born December 15, 1888 in Copenhagen - March 28, 1954) was a Danish architect and furniture designer. He was a Lecturer in furniture design at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen 1924. Style epitomized by clean, pure lines, the best materials of his time and superb craftsmanship. The designs of Klint were based on neo-classical designs, and were simple and elegant.
- Werner Aisslinger
Werner Aisslinger born Berlin 1964 is a German furniture designer. From 1987-1991 he studied Design at the University of Arts (Hochschule der Künste) in Berlin from 1989-1992 Freelanced at Jasper Morrison and Ron Arad in London. In 1993 at Studio de Lucchi in Milan he founded “studio aisslinger” which was to be based in Berlin, focusing on product design, design concepts and brand architecture.
- Shiro Kuramata
Shiro Kuramata (1934-1991) is one of Japan's most important designers of the 20th century. Kuramata was mainly known for his use of industrial materials such as wire steel mesh and lucite to create architectural interiors and furniture. Revolutionary pieces such as the "How High the Moon" chair (1986) reflect the emerging dynamism and maturing creativity of postwar Japan.
- Henry Copeland
Henry Copeland was an 18th century English cabinetmaker and furniture designer. He appears to have been the first manufacturing cabinetmaker who published designs for furniture. "A New Book of Ornaments" appeared in 1746, but it is not clear whether the engravings with this title formed part of a book, or were issued only in separate plates; a few of the latter are all that are known to exist.
- Herb Ritts
Herb Ritts was an American fashion photographer who concentrated on black-and-white photography and portraits in the style of classical Greek sculpture. Consequently some of his more famous pieces are of male and female nudes in what can be called glamour photography. He was born in Los Angeles, California to a prosperous family who owned a furniture business.
- William Kent
William Kent (born in Bridlington, Yorkshire, c. 1685 - April 12, 1748) was an eminent English architect, landscape architect and furniture designer of the early 18th century.
- Jacques Doucet
Jacques Doucet (1853 - 1929) was a French fashion designer, known for his elegant dresses, made with flimy translucent materials in superimposing pastel colors. He was born in Paris in 1853 to a prosperous family whose lingerie and fine linens business, Doucet Lingerie, had flourushed in the Rue de la Paix since 1816. In 1871, Doucet opened a salon selling ladies apparel. An enthusiastic collector of eighteenth-century furniture, objets d'art, paintings and sculptures, …
- Doris Salcedo
Doris Salcedo is a Colombian-born sculptor. Salcedo completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the Universidad de Bogotá in 1980, before travelling to New York, which she completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at New York University. She then returned to Bogotá to teach at the Universidad. Her work is influenced by her experiences of life in Colombia, and is generally composed of items of furniture.
- Jules Leleu
Jules Leleu (1883-1961) was a French furniture designer. He was born in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France and at age 26 succeeded his father in the family painting business. With his brother he began work in the Decorating field. After World War I, Leleu specialized in furniture making. He opened a Paris gallery in 1924 and exhibited at the 1925 Exposition Industrielle et Arts Decoratifs.
- Henry Hill
Henry Hill (born 1918) is an American artist. Hill was born in Oak Park, Illinois, the son and grandson of executives of a furniture company. He studied fine arts at Cornell University, but dropped out only a year before completing his studies. He moved to California in 1939, hoping to join the newly-founded Disney Company as an artist, but was not hired. Shortly afterward, he joined the Army as the United States entered World War II, …
- George Montgomery
George Montgomery (August 29, 1916 - December 12, 2000) was an American painter, sculptor, furniture craftsman, and stuntman who is best known as an actor in western style film and television. Born George Montgomery Letz to Ukrainian immigrant parents in Brady, Montana, he was the youngest of fifteen children. He was raised on a large ranch where as a part of daily life he learned to ride horses and work cattle.
- Dard Hunter
Dard Hunter, born William Joseph Hunter, was an American authority on printing, paper, and papermaking—especially by hand, using the tools and craft of four centuries prior. Hunter produced two hundred copies of his book "Old Papermaking", preparing every aspect of the book himself: he wrote the text, designed and cast the type, did the typesetting, handmade the paper, and printed and bound the book.
- George Hepplewhite
George Hepplewhite (1727? - June 21, 1786) was a cabinet and chair maker. He was one of the "big three" English furniture makers of the 18th century, along with Thomas Sheraton and Thomas Chippendale. There are no pieces of furniture made by Hepplewhite or his firm known to exist but he gave his name to a distinctive style of light, elegant furniture that was fashionable between about 1775 and 1800. Reproductions of his designs continued through the following centuries.
- Jeremy Broun
Jeremy Broun is a British woodworker, furniture designer maker, speaker, and writer. Broun's furniture is innovative in the use of technique and form. His Caterpillar Rocking chair in 1984 'is visually stunning, a good combination of colour, structure and practicality... and has the advantage of being a truly original idea : just as Saarinen and his pedestal chairs converted four chairlegs into one' ("An Encyclopedia of Chairs" - The Apple Press).
- Charles Eastlake
Charles Locke Eastlake (1836 - 1906) was a British architect and furniture designer. Trained by the architect Philip Hardwick (1792-1870) he popularised William Morris's notions of decorative arts in the Arts and Crafts style, becoming one of the principal exponents of the revived "Early English" or "Modern Gothic Style" popular in Victorian architecture. He made no furniture himself, his designs being produced by professional cabinet makers.
- Matthias Lock
Matthias Lock was an English 18th century furniture designer and cabinet-maker. The dates of his birth and death are unknown; but he was a disciple of Chippendale, and subsequently of the Adams, …
- Pedro Friedeberg
Pedro Friedeberg (born January 11, 1937) is a Mexican painter. Friedeberg was born in Florence, Italy, on January 11, 1937, the son of German-Jewish parents, Friedeberg arrived in Mexico at the age of three. Having shown an early inclination for drawing and reading, he studied architecture at the Universidad Iberoamericana, where he was profoundly influenced by the teaching of Mathias Goeritz, a German-Mexican artist.
- Alan Peters
Alan Peters is a British furniture designer maker who is one of the very few direct links with the Arts and Crafts Movement, having apprenticed to Edward Barnsley. He set up his own workshop in the Sixties. He is well known for his book "Cabinetmaking - a professional approach", and his revision (for the fourth edition) of Ernest Joyce's "The Technique of Furniture Making".
- Peter Ghyczy
Peter Ghyczy is a furniture designer. He was born in 1940 in Budapest. After the 1956 revolution, Ghyczy fled to West Germany, where he studied architecture at the University of Aachen. He worked for Reuter in Lemförde where he headed the design section. He most famously designed the Garden Egg chair in 1968 that became a classic of industrial design as it explored the use of plastic in furniture. Ghyczy founded his own company in 1972.
- Jean Henri Riesener
Jean-Henri Riesener (4 July 1734 - 6 January 1806), born in Gladbeck near Essen in Germany, moved to Paris where he apprenticed soon after 1754 with Jean-François Oeben, whose widow he married, and was received master ébéniste in January 1768. The following year he began supplying furniture for the Crown and in July 1774 formally became "ébéniste ordinaire du roi", …
- Ambrose Heal
Sir Ambrose Heal (1872-1959) was an English artist, furniture designer and company director in the early 1900s. From 1913 to 1950 he was the managing director of the Heals furniture manufacturing and retail business in England.
- Hugh Roberts
Sir Hugh Ashley Roberts, KCVO FSA, is director of the Royal Collection and Surveyor of the Queen's Works of Art. He was closely involved in the restoration of Windsor Castle after the serious fire in 1992. He was previously a Director of Christie's and was head of the Decorative Arts Departments there. His particular area of expertise is French and English furniture and interior decoration of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, …
- Silas Kopf
Silas Kopf is a furniture maker specializing in the art of marquetry. Born in 1949, Kopf graduated from Princeton University in 1972 with a degree in architecture and soon began designing and making furniture. In 1988, he received a Craftsman's Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and used the opportunity to study traditional marquetry technique at the École Boulle, an institute of interior architecture and design, in Paris.
- Gustave Serrurier-Bovy
Gustave Serrurier-Bovy was a Belgian architect and furniture designer. Along with Paul Hankar, Victor Horta and Henry van de Velde, he is one of the principal architects in Belgium to work in the Art Nouveau style. In 1884, he visited England, where he became interested in the Arts and Crafts movement. Returning to Belgium, he brought with the movement's ideas and some of his own productions inspired by the British artists, which he sold at his store in Liège.
- Charles Voysey
Charles Francis Annesley Voysey (1857 - 1941), an English architect and furniture designer, was one of the first people to understand and appreciate the significance of industrial design. Although he was influenced by the work of William Morris, the Arts and Crafts Movement and the Art Nouveau Movement, he was concerned with form and function rather than ornamental complexities. His furniture designs were simple and functional and only sparingly decorated.
- Max Gate
Max Gate is the former home of Thomas Hardy and is located in Dorchester, Dorset, England. Hardy designed and lived in Max Gate from 1885 until his death in 1928. It was here that he wrote "Tess of the d'Urbervilles", "Jude the Obscure" and "The Mayor of Casterbridge", as well as much of his poetry. Max Gate is now owned by the National Trust. The house contains several pieces of Hardy's furniture, …
- Daniel Marot
Daniel Marot was a French Protestant, an architect, furniture designer and engraver at the forefront of the classicizing Late Baroque "Louis XIV" style. He was a pupil of Jean le Pautre and the son of Jean Marot (1620 - 1679), who was also an architect and engraver. Marot was working independently as an engraver from an early age, making engravings of designs by Jean Bérain, one of Louis XIV's official designers at the Manufacture des Gobelins, …
- Fortunato Depero
Fortunato Depero (March 30, 1892 - November 29, 1960) was an Italian futurist painter, writer, sculptor and graphic designer. Although born in Fondo (in the Italian Trentino region), Depero grew up in Rovereto and it was here he first began exhibiting his works, while serving as an apprentice to a marble worker. It was on a 1913 trip to Florence that he discovered a copy of the paper "Lacerba" and an article by one of the founders of the futurism movement, …