The mid-century modern craze: clean-looking furniture for a dirty world

I moved flats recently and decided I should buy some new furniture to fit the new space: a lounge chair, a couple of lamps, maybe a nightstand for the bedroom. I thought I’d find a wide range of options, but everywhere I turned stores in Los Angeles were pushing variations on the same style: unadorned, airy, lean and elegant – the sort of home decor that would not be out of place on an episode of Mad Men. A single vibe prevailed: mid-century modern (MCM).

I quickly learned that at some point in the past 10 years the cult of MCM design, once intense but self-contained, had grown into a mass religion. Long, low couches and womb-style chairs now appear in high-end galleries and discount stores, at the mall and in the auction house.

How did we get to be fanatics for a style that, in its original formulation, lasted just a decade, from 1947 to 1957?

The classic shapes of Eames and Nelson and Noguchi began their broad resurgence in the early 1990s. That’s when the key purveyors of the style from the postwar years, Knoll and Herman Miller, returned to making items for the home after a several-decades-long detour into office furniture.

But it was a savvy, style-minded businessman, Rob Forbes, who made MCM both glamorous and attainable. In 1999, Forbes founded Design Within Reach, a company that would disrupt the furniture business by bringing MCM pieces directly to consumers. Until that point, people had to buy their MCM through middlemen and showrooms; now they could buy them via catalogue and have the pieces delivered from a warehouse.

“It’s high-quality comfort food,” Forbes says whenasked to explain MCM’s appeal. It’s full of joy and optimism, not so serious, easy to appreciate.