Tag Archives: knoll

Knoll: Platner Lounge Chairs

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Office Furniture Outlet has liquidated two very special chairs.  These are no ordinary office chairs they are Platner Lounge Chairs.  Knoll’s designer Warren Platner designed the Platner Lounge Chair.  The steel wire frame chair looks more like a sculpture than a chair.  However, Platner’s chair is very comfortable.  Having had the pleasure of sitting in one — you are quickly transported into a time gone by.

The Platner Lounge Chairs are a great example of recycling office furniture.  Had the Platner c

hairs not been liquidated they would have headed to the landfill.  Instead they will get a second chance at life in someone’s home or office.

Read more about Warren Platner in the article below. If you are interested in purchasing the recycled Knoll Platner Lounge Chairs give Office Furniture Outlet a call at (757) 855-2800.

Warren Platner: Beyond Steel Wire Retrospect | Apartment Therapy

Warren Platner is famous for his iconic steel wire designs for Knoll (images 1-3). This suite of furniture is still remarkably popular, a perfect combination of sleek modernist materials and sensuous curvilinear form. But Platner was no one-trick pony. Take a look at some of the other designs he created during his long career.

Born in 1919, Platner was a Cornell-trained architect who started his career in the offices of Eero Saarinen and I.M. Pei. While working for Kevin Roche, Platner took on the interior architecture design of some important commissions, and began focusing on furniture and interiors.

He designed the Knoll line in 1966 (images 1-3), using nickel-coated steel wires and shaping them into elegant forms that he likened to the “decorative, gentle, graceful” designs of the Louis XV era.

Platner’s other designs have not been as enduring. This may be a reflection of the incredible importance of Knoll’s enduring success and efficacy as manufacturers. But it might also be because Platner never achieved the same timelessness in his other work. His boxy walnut armchair on a metal base (image 4) seems rooted in the Mid-Century aesthetic, while his space-agey sofa for Steelcase is maybe too chilly for a broad audience (image 5). You may like these designs (do you? I do!), but I’m not sure you could argue that they totally transcend their era, while the steel wire Knoll line works alongside an eclectic range of styles.

Platner’s interiors present a totally new aspect of his work. His American Restaurant in Kansas City (images 6 & 7) featured a scalloped motif in oak and lightbulbs fanning up from the floor to the ceiling. The Hall family (of Hallmark Card fame) commissioned the American, so Platner wanted to make the interior look like a greeting card — by night, it looks like a big doily (image 7). Meanwhile his interior for the Windows on the World restaurant in the World Trade Center drew geometric lines in brass, his furnishings running a low horizontal profile to contrast with the spectacular verticals of the windows and columns (image 8). And talk about spectacular, his mirrored entrance corridor (image 9), which featured photo-murals of New York on the silver walls, was like a journey into outer space, an apt if over-the-top introduction to the restaurant’s mid-air location.

Platner’s steel wire line for Knoll may be the most enduring of his work, but his career was long and prolific (he died in 2006). A canny interpreter of the zeitgeist, his designs reflected the prevailing values of the time, whether it was organic modernism, space-age sexiness, or skyscraping glitz.

via Warren Platner: Beyond Steel Wire Retrospect | Apartment Therapy.

For Furniture Designer Richard Schultz, It’s Back To Knoll – Forbes

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Richard Schultz is back at Knoll as he sold his brand to Knoll in March, 2012. Schultz began his career at Knoll in the 60′s.  His petal table pictured above can be seen in the Museum of Modern Art in New York city. With the rise of mid-century trends in the marketplace Knoll and Schultz will make a great team once again. It will be a while before Office Furniture Outlet will see Schultz’s designs on our showroom of used office furniture but we always keep up to date on what is trending in new office furniture. Read more on Richard Schultz below.

For Furniture Designer Richard Schultz, It’s Back To Knoll – Forbes

For outdoor furniture designer Richard Schultz, last month’s sale of his brand to Knoll, Inc., the purveyor of modern office furniture by the likes of  Eero Saarinen, Warren Platner and Harry Bertoia, completes a full circle. Schultz’s classic designs such as the Petal Table, and his contemporary pieces like the Topiary Collection, are now under Knoll’s umbrella. Here’s the back story.

When Schultz started his design career at Knoll in 1960, the company was so close knit that when he and co-worker Trudy Busch got married, owner Florence Knoll lent out her Paris apartment to them for their honeymoon. Schultz’s first breakthrough design was the Petal Table, inspired by a weed, Queen Anne’s Lace, on the Schultzes’ Pennsylvania farmhouse property. It was designed to accompany Bertoia’s iconic wire chairs for Knoll, and was made part of the permanent design collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Next up in 1966: a collection of sleek chaise lounges billed as the Leisure Collection, designed at the request of Florence Knoll for her Florida home. “My editor was Mrs. Knoll,” Schultz says. He stayed on at Knoll until 1973, when he left to be a freelance designer. Knoll itself was bought and sold many times, and Schultz’s furniture went out of production.

Fast forward to 1990. Schultz had prototypes of a visionary line called the Topiary Collection made out of perforated sheet aluminum. He now calls it “the funny one with the holes in it,” or to quote him in the current catalogue:  “I wanted to design a chair that looks like a shrub pruned to look like a chair.” He tried to peddle it to various manufacturers, including the staid Brown Jordan, but the reaction he got was that it was “too weird.” Undeterred, he and son Peter, an architect in New York, took that rejection as the impetus to start Richard Schultz Design in 1992. There would be two missions: to reintroduce the classics with some reengineering (the Leisure Collection was renamed the 1966 Collection), and to have an outlet for Schultz’s newest designs.

New designs came easily: The Café Collection of stackable chairs with funky triangular folds in the seat and the back; the Swell Collection of outsized pieces for customers who found the 1966 Collection “too puny” (Richard Schultz doesn’t sugar coat things). He stayed in the design room for the most part; Peter managed the business side of things; and Trudy kept a notebook of all the disasters, including failing thread. “It was rather sinister of her,” Schultz quips.

The craze for mid-century furnishings heated up, and consumers started splurging on outdoor living rooms. When Knoll made its first call on the Schultzes to ask whether they would entertain a sale five years ago, the Schultzes said no. Each year they came out with new product lines, building the value of the brand, riding out the recession. This year, with high-end buyers back, the Schultzes felt the timing was right when Knoll knocked again, and the sale went through in March. (Richard had gifted his shares to Peter for estate planning purposes, so Peter was 100% owner at the time of the sale).

Richard and Trudy are now retired in Vermont, where Richard is trying to focus on his small scale metal sculpture work. Peter signed up for three years as a consultant to Knoll to help with the transition. “We are a Knoll product, hence Peter is a Knoll product,” Richard says, smiling at Trudy and then at Peter.

via For Furniture Designer Richard Schultz, It’s Back To Knoll – Forbes.

Give your home a ‘Mad Men’ makeover | Fox News

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Mad Men returns this week, and if you’re a fan of the hit show, you may have wondered how you can emulate some of those incredible ’60s styles and fashions at home. After all, while the carousing, drinking and comically bad parenting gives the show its nostalgic appeal, it’s the close attention to mid-century design that helps bring Mad Men to life.

In the 1960s, design was heading in bold new directions, embracing bright colors and a bold, minimalist aesthetic. But a big part of what made 1960s design so interesting was that it straddled two eras: a time when men still wore ties and hats, but women were starting to wear miniskirts. It had both class and sex appeal, restraint and vibrancy.

If you’d like to emulate some of these styles at home, we’ll show you where to find period-perfect furniture, and some low-cost alternatives for those looking to redesign on a budget.

The Eames Chair

Two of the most towering figures in post-war design, the husband and wife duo of Charles and Ray Eames pioneered a bold new aesthetic that used mass-production techniques developed during the war, as well as materials like plastic, plywood and fiberglass, which were still fairly uncommon. These weren’t meant to be twee, hand-crafted showpieces, but products for everyday use in the everyday world, and a large part of the Eames’ genius lay in their ability to create bold, sexy new designs that could still be mass produced on a massive scale.

But relying on plastic wasn’t just a convenience of mass-production. It also allowed for strange shapes and bright colors, a stark departure from the austere look of the traditional wooden bankers chair that had long dominated the office setting. One of their most iconic works, the Eames Molded Chair, was said to look “like a potato chip,” and was sure to draw stares when it first debuted in 1948. But the fact that it was affordable, stackable, durable and comfortable made it a winner. A few of these clustered around the kitchen table and you’ll have domestic setting fit for the Drapers.

In the living room, Charles and Ray continued to revolutionize the way we recline with their Lounger, which the couple developed for film director Billy Wilder. With the lounger, the Eames were looking to capture the comfort of an English club chair, but with a modern flair, eventually creating a style that resembled a “well-used first baseman’s mitt.” It’s a chair built for kicking back after a long day of work, cut crystal tumbler of scotch in hand and a record on the hi-fi.

Knoll’s Saarinen Table

Many of the styles favored by designers in the 1960s — clean lines and spartan styles — would fit right in with the Mac-obsessed esthetic of the present. Take Knoll’s Saarinen table, with its sleek curves and milk-white minimalism, it looks like something you’d pick up at the Apple Store, but actually serves as Roger Sterling’s desk on the show.

Pair the table with the company’s Tulip Chairs and you’ll have the austere, space-age aesthetic that came from a time when we still got excited about ascending into the heavens, but wouldn’t look out of place in today’s technology-saturated age.

Herman Miller Couch

Herman Miller’s Mr. Nilsson Sofa is a throwback, an homage to many of the company’s great mid-century designs, and is intended to conjure up the swagger of the Rolling Stones and willowy sex appeal of Twiggy. Sitting low to the ground and featuring bold, clean lines, the Mr. Nilsson Sofa is the perfect place to take a scotch-induced mid-afternoon nap.

Doing it On the Cheap

While Herman Miller, Knoll and Vitra still crank out their classic designs, these cherished styles now command a premium, and unless your willing to part with several thousand dollars for a piece of Mad Men-era furniture, you’re going to have to put your Don Draper dreams on hold.

Fortunately there are a number of places to get these styles for a fraction of the cost. While an Eames Lounger will set you back around $5,000, you can get an Eames-inspired chair for a tenth of the price from Ikea. Herman Miller’s Mr. Nilsson Sofa is probably out of the reach of most, but for less than $500 you can get mid-century style couch from Urban Outfitters. And Knoll’s kitchen table can cost thousands, but fortunately you can get a knockoff from Walmart for less than $1,000.

Finally, a 1960s paint job will give your home that final touch of authenticity. Sherwin-Williams has the lowdown on the favored color schemes of the day, so for the cost of a few buckets of paint and a few pieces of furniture, you can recreate one of these swinging, stylish homes.

via Give your home a ‘Mad Men’ makeover | Fox News.