How Coveted Midcentury Furniture Is Getting Way More Coppable

Welcome to Field Guide, a column by Sami Reiss of Snake covering all-time design and where you can find it.

At a recent edition of Salone del Mobile in Milan, Cassina, the Italian furniture company, debuted a light by Ray and Charles Eames 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 licensing company that opened shop expressly to make designer midcentury furnishings more accessible to the era’s aficionados.

For that crowd, Form’s 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with those of legacy producers, are today creating a refreshed retail environment for historic design objects: some originally made only in small numbers, others that may have been produced at grand scale but went out of production, and, in the case of the Galaxy, those that were never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.

For Form’s 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’s studio. A long-time collector of Wegner’s, 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’s name and body of work, the family didn’t know what to do.

“If an artist makes music,” Masiello explains, “a music publisher manages these rights—but that doesn’t exist in the design world.” Or it didn’t 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—including the death of a designer—determine whether it remains in production.) Most notably, the firm helped return Paul McCobb’s work to the market after a several-decades-long absence. While he was among the most popular designers of the 1950s and ’60s—his disarmingly simple tapered-leg chairs and desks were often modular, and built out the midcentury home and office aesthetic—times changed, and his pieces fell out of production. And over the past several years, the McCobb heirs, through Form, have returned the designer’s 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.

The process for bringing some of these objects to market can be lengthy. To update Eames’s Helena light, originally created for a church in Arkansas, Eames Demetrios, Ray and Charles’s grandson and the Eames Office’s 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 Finnish design brand, is responsible for a faithful remake of Yrjö Kukkapuro’s Experiment chair. (Having debuted at Salone del Mobile in 1982, the chair itself isn’t midcentury, but Kukkapuro is of that era.) On its own, Eames Office handles the creation of some of Ray and Charles’s 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.”

Bigger furniture makers also have their own archival operations. MillerKnoll, which comprises Herman Miller and Knoll, has an archives department that dates back to 1923, when the Herman Miller Furniture Company was founded. (Founder and executive D.J. DePree’s assistant, Hannah Mae Borst, started saving material from then that would form the archive collections.) The current archive is about “one third production-focused,” says Amy Auscherman, who directs its operations. It comprises everything from marketing materials to fabric swatches to prototypes of old pieces never sent into production—often purchased by Auscherman on auction websites—as well as drawings and sketches that make up what she calls “records of design.” The archives’s prototypes, old models, and swatches give MillerKnoll’s engineers an exact guideline of how to remake classic designs. “Here’s how it’s upholstered, here’s how its legs are attached,” Auscherman says. Tech is sometimes involved: for a set of recently rereleased Gilbert Rohde tables, Herman Miller contracted a 3D-scanning expert within Michigan’s automotive industry to capture the 1941 tables before handing them off to engineers. Ultimately, the breadth and depth of the archives allow for what Auscherman describes as “a faithful update that’s not a departure”—furniture that speaks to the original items, but which might require different materials or production techniques due to time having passed since the original was produced.

Which was true with Eames’s elephant toy: originally produced in 1945 in plywood as a prototype, it was officially introduced in 2020 in that material, and then produced at scale in plastic. “It took two materials to capture the vision,” says Demetrios. “The plastic elephant is much more affordable—who’s going to let their kid play with that expensive [plywood] elephant?”

Outside of collaborations with Form Portfolios or Cassina, Eames Office regulates and preserves the legacy of Charles and Ray Eames, oftentimes deciding which design objects from the couple’s massive back catalog to prioritize and re-release. Demetrios says the archive is massive—for reference, it includes 150,000 prints—and so not every project is chosen, but that the goal is to keep it going, honor the legacy, and make the future-looking and timeless items available to future generations. “The difference between design and art,” says Demetrios, “is that if a designer designs something, they want to continue it after their death. As long as people are responding to these designs, the [Eames] designs would be available.”

Well-executed retro productions, like the Helena church lamp, the elephant, or Hem’s Kukkapuro, hint at a new sort of market, or maybe an old one: A retail environment where futuristic, accessible, minimal lamps and chairs are more available via scaled production. They might not be vintage, but the McCobb and Eames reproductions created in good faith by license holders have their own air of authenticity. For those who are getting into design, it might offer an explanation of why we can’t just buy cool old furniture like we buy Levi’s. For design diehards, knowing an object has a pedigree might just be enough to give it pride of place.

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It’s possible that nothing can replace the thrill of scoring an original piece at auction—but constantly scouring sites can turn into a black hole of a hobby. Here’s where to get the next best thing right now.

Yrjö Kukkapuro’s Experiment chair

An avant-garde masterpiece from 1982, the Experiment was always easier to acquire in Europe than in North America. A recent reproduction by Hem gets the details right, is available in a number of colors and has, for retail furniture with a point of view, a refreshingly accessible price.

Exposior Pendant by Paul McCobb for CB2

Originally designed in 1951 by McCobb, this minimal piece glides well with other aesthetics and styles, and the midnight blue makes it stand out from other midcentury furnishings. Plus, it’s priced well.

Eames Plastic Elephant

All that can be understood about Eames can be discovered through any one of their pieces, and the new elephant, originally developed in plywood in 1945, exists perfectly as a retro, with every detail and wrinkle perfectly expressed. It’s pored over, but still kinetic.