Rooms & ProjectsUnder $2,500: Where Collecting Modern Design Can Start
Eight lots in the current sale with a high estimate at or below $2,500, each of them by a designer with a documented body of work.
1910–1961
Architect who set out to clear what he called the slum of legs under a table, and answered it with a single pedestal.
Why they matter
Saarinen arrived at Cranbrook as a child when his father Eliel took a post there, studied sculpture in Paris and architecture at Yale, and spent a short career moving between buildings and furniture. The buildings are the TWA terminal, Dulles and the Gateway Arch. The furniture is almost all for Knoll.
The Womb chair came in 1948. The Pedestal group was designed across 1955 and 1956 and introduced in 1957, an attempt to get rid of the four separate legs under every chair and table. The compromise he accepted, an aluminium base under a fiberglass shell, reportedly still bothered him.
Tulip tables read well outdoors in Los Angeles because the base sheds water and the top wipes clean. Period examples have chipped and yellowed and the honest ones show it.
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Key forms & materials
Forms
- Tulip chair
- Tulip table
- Womb chair
- Womb settee
- Grasshopper chair
- Pedestal side table
Materials
- Molded fiberglass
- Cast aluminium
- Steel
- Laminate
- Marble
What to look for
Marks, editions, patina and production partners — fact-checked for this designer.
- Knoll is the only authorised maker, and period labels run from a silver Knoll Associates foil rectangle in the 1950s and 1960s to Knoll International after 1969 and later to a stamped medallion.
- Describe the Pedestal group as designed in 1955 to 1956 and introduced in 1957, since the sources differ and a single year overstates what is known.
- The base is cast aluminium under a painted finish, so a chip reveals grey metal; a base that chips to white plastic is a reproduction.
- Unlicensed tulip-form tables and chairs are made in enormous quantity and are only honest when described as reproductions.
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