Welcome to Style Detective, a series from T Magazine. Each month, we’ll investigate readers’ questions regarding the items and objects they can’t stop thinking about — and can’t track down. Subscribe here and click this link to submit your own questions.
 | By Tom Delavan Tom Delavan is the design and interiors director of T Magazine. |
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“My partner, Monica, and I own a 1946 Modernist home in Palm Springs, Calif. It’s been designated a Class 1 historic property by the city. To restore it, we’ve used early photos of the space taken by Julius Shulman and bluelines by 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 have an interesting wing shape, and the legs are attached in the center with crossbars. The photo, by Shulman, seems to have been taken circa 1952.” — Carlos, Los Angeles
This was a tough one. I did a deep Google search for midcentury outdoor furniture, and a name that kept coming up was Richard Schultz, an American designer known for his flowerlike Petal Table and steel wire-formed 715 Chaise Lounge. But Schultz’s 1966 collection, considered by some to be the first meaningful example of modern outdoor furniture, didn’t yet exist when Julius Shulman took the photos you provided. A more specific hunt for outdoor canvas chairs brought up Antonio Bonet, Juan Kurchan and Jorge Ferrari Hardoy’s Butterfly chairs and these contemporary sling chairs, but none had a taut canvas seat and back. I reached out to my friends at the auction houses, where I also struck out, which means that there isn’t a secondary market for these pieces or anything similar.
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| The elusive chairs, photographed outside the Robson Chambers House in Palm Springs, Calif., 1952. Julius Shulman, © J. Paul Getty Trust, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles |
Then I emailed Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, the curator of contemporary design at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in Manhattan. A big fan of group chats — “I have several going at all times,” she says — she shared my request with Mark McDonald, Patrick Parrish and Simon Andrews, experts on 20th-century design who were buying or selling furniture from that era long before the general public knew what an Eames chair was.
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| An early 1950s advertisement for the chair, touting it as a “budget beauty.” Courtesy of @esotericsurvey |
They got on the case and — eureka! — Parrish found ours in George Nelson’s 1953 book, “Chairs.” As you suspected, 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, Calif., and, at age 13, reportedly contributed to the planning of his family home — and manufactured by the Los Angeles-based Pacific Iron Products, a company that also collaborated in the 1950s with renowned designers such as Paul László and John Keal.
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| From the 1953 book “Chairs,” edited by the Modernist designer George Nelson. The Milo Baughman design is pictured on the right, second from the top. Acanthus Press (1994 edition) |
Armed with this information, I tracked down a version of the chairs at Esoteric Survey, a design blog and online store. According to Steve Aldana, the 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 furnishings. From an ad for the chairs, it looks like they sold for $34.50. Around the same time, a version was also featured in the magazine Living for Young Homemakers, which published Shulman’s 1950 photographs, and House Beautiful’s Pace Setter Houses, an editorial series launched to oppose the International Style of design pioneered by the likes of Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
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| Left: the chair, with green canvas covering. Right: the angular frames of the chair were made from iron. Courtesy of @esotericsurvey |
If you want your own set right away, you might consider hiring someone to make a frame and canvas cover. (Jason Pickens, an L.A.-based furniture fabricator, estimated the cost for a chair like this at around $3,300.) But if you’re intent on acquiring one or more of Baughman’s originals, patience is required: Aldana says he hasn’t come across any for a while. Luckily, such a wait often makes finding elusive objects even more rewarding. “People who work in the design world,” says Cunningham Cameron, “we all have the hunter gene.”
