Welcome to Style Detective, a series from T Magazine. Each month we’ll investigate readers’ questions about the items they can’t stop thinking about and can’t find. Subscribe here and click this link to submit your own questions.
“My partner, Monica, and I own a 1946 modernist house in Palm Springs, California. It has been designated a Class 1 historic property by the city. To restore it, we used early photos of the space taken by Julius Shulman and the blue lines of the original architect, Robson Chambers, but we can’t find these specific outdoor chairs. They appear to be made of canvas and simple metal tubes. The armrests are shaped Interesting wing design and the legs are attached to the center with crossbars. The photo, by Shulman, appears to have been taken around 1952.” —Carlos, Los Angeles.
It was a difficult question. I did an extensive Google search for mid-century outdoor furniture, and one name that kept coming up was Richard Schultz, an American designer known for his flower-shaped Petal table and steel wire 715 lounge chair. But Schultz’s 1966 collection, considered by some to be the first significant example of modern outdoor furniture, did not yet exist when Julius Shulman took the photos you provided. A more specific search for outdoor canvas chairs yielded Antonio Bonet, Juan Kurchan and Jorge Ferrari Hardoy’s Butterfly chairs and these contemporary sling chairs, but none had a stretched canvas seat and back. I contacted my friends at the auction houses, where I also deleted, meaning there is no secondary market for these coins or anything similar.
Next, I emailed Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, curator of contemporary design at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in Manhattan. A big fan of group chats—“I have several at any given time,” she says—she shared my request with Mark McDonald, Patrick Parrish, and Simon Andrews, 20th-century design experts who were buying or selling furniture from that era long before the general public knew what an Eames chair was.
They tackled the case and — eureka! — Parrish found ours in George Nelson’s 1953 book, “Chairs.” As you might expect, the one in question is made from a canvas cover stretched over an iron frame. It was designed by Milo Baughman – who grew up in Long Beach, California and, at age 13, was said to have helped plan his family home – and manufactured by Los Angeles-based Pacific Iron Products, a company that also collaborated in the 1950s with renowned designers such as Paul László and John Keal.
Armed with this information, I found a version of the chairs on Esoteric Survey, a design blog and online store. According to Steve Aldana, a postwar design enthusiast and dealer who runs the website, they were part of a collection called the Palisades Group that was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1951 Good Design program, a series of exhibitions promoting affordable, well-made modern home furniture. Based on an ad for the chairs, it appears they sold for $34.50. Around the same time, a version was also featured in Living for Young Homemakers magazine, which published Shulman’s 1950 photographs, and Pace Setter Houses from House Beautiful, an editorial series launched to oppose the international style of design pioneered by Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
If you want to create your own set right away, you might consider hiring someone to make a frame and canvas cover. (Jason Pickens, a Los Angeles-based furniture maker, estimated the cost of a chair like this at about $3,300.) But if you intend to acquire one or more of the Baughman originals, patience is required: Aldana says he hasn’t come across one in a while. Fortunately, such anticipation often makes the search for elusive items even more rewarding. “People who work in the design world,” says Cunningham Cameron, “we all have the hunter gene.”
