Mid-century modern is revered because its feels timeless. The aesthetic is marked by clean and simple lines with few extraneous details. Kicking off (roughly) in the 1930s, mid-century modern marked a period when people wanted good-looking furniture at moderate price points. Nowadays, the original designs from this era are hardly affordable, but their swagger lives on. In order of inception, these are 15 of the most iconic mid-century modern pieces of furniture.
Wassily Kandinsky, this chair’s namesake, was the first person to be blessed with seeing Marcel Breuer’s tubular steel chair, the first of its kind. Breuer, a product of the Bauhaus movement, took the standard club chair and pared it down to simple, straight lines. The Wassily chair doesn’t fall squarely into Bauhaus or mid-century modern, and that’s because the chair’s inception came at a time when designers were beginning to transition from the former to the latter.
