How Coveted Midcentury Furniture Is Getting Way More Coppable

Welcome to Field Guide, a column by Sami Reiss of Snake covering all-time design and where you can find it.

At a recent edition of Salone del Mobile in Milan, Cassina, the Italian furniture company, debuted a light by Ray and Charles Eames that had never been put into production before. Working behind the scenes of the release of the Galaxy, a 1949 design, was Form Portfolios, a licensing company that opened shop expressly to make designer midcentury furnishings more accessible to the era’s aficionados.

For that crowd, Form’s efforts, along with those of legacy producers, are today creating a refreshed retail environment for historic design objects: some originally made only in small numbers, others that may have been produced at grand scale but went out of production, and, in the case of the Galaxy, those that were never created to begin with. These objects now give the vehement design lover other options besides shelling out five figures for a vintage piece, or competing against other buyers at auction in hopes of a deal on one.

For Form’s founder and CEO, Mark Masiello, seeing through the release of the Galaxy and more objects like it comes out of a "pure love for design and a desire to bring innovation to the industry," he says. An avid furniture collector who was working in private equity, Masiello began Form, based in Rhode Island and Copenhagen, in 2017 after taking a tour of Hans Wegner’s studio. A long-time collector of Wegner’s, Masiello was moved by a folder containing designs for the Wishbone chair, and dismayed by the spare fashion in which the studio was operating. "It was just one family member," Masiello says, "part-time, three days a week." It was clear the archive was languishing: despite Wegner’s name and body of work, the family didn’t know what to do.

"If an artist makes music," Masiello explains, "a music publisher manages these rights—but that doesn’t exist in the design world." Or it didn’t before: Form, Masiello says, has put 600-plus pieces into production by connecting families with producers. (In furniture, generally, a designer owns a design and licenses it to a furniture company, which then produces it. Myriad factors, though—including the death of a designer—determine whether it remains in production.) Most notably, the firm helped return Paul McCobb’s work to the market after a several-decades-long absence. While he was among the most popular designers of the 1950s and ’60s—his disarmingly simple tapered-leg chairs and desks were often modular, and built out the midcentury home and office aesthetic—times changed, and his pieces fell out of production. And over the past several years, the McCobb heirs, through Form, have returned the designer’s work back into wide availability under several different makers. CB2, notably, has reintroduced several designs by McCobb, many of them from his Irwin collection and others a selection of Bowtie seating.

The process for bringing some of these objects to market can be lengthy. To update Eames’s Helena light, originally created for a church in Arkansas, Eames Demetrios, Ray and Charles’s grandson and the Eames Office’s chair, says he spent 200 hours interviewing people, including churchgoers, who were close to the object in some way. Recreating other items is more straightforward: Hem, a Finnish design brand, is responsible for a faithful remake of Yrjo Kukkapuro’s Experiment chair. (Having debuted at Salone del Mobile in 1982, the chair itself isn’t midcentury, but Kukkapuro is of that era.) On its own, Eames Office handles the creation of some of Ray and Charles’s designs, like an elephant toy that was never put into production until recently. As with that instance, sometimes items are rolled out with an eye toward younger consumers, or those who are new to design. "The elephants were part of that," says Demetrios, an "entryway into design."