The Perfect Match: How the Aesthetics of Tennis Influence Design
The sport’s style dominated our living spaces long before it was called #tenniscore.
The sport’s style dominated our living spaces long before it was called #tenniscore.
This story is part of Design Goals, our week-long series celebrating the interplay between sports and style.
Sport and style have always coexisted (well, maybe not for the ancient Olympians who competed in the nude). Games like soccer and basketball have long influenced fashion trends, and American football gave us the football phone. But we’re now living in a moment where athletes possess more cultural sway than ever. Of all the athletic disciplines, tennis has informed continuous influence over design, possessing a cultural and visual language that speaks to many—whether they’re fans of the game or not.
Like many other institutions that capture the zeitgeist, tennis is rooted in money and the upper echelons of society. Originating as a game played in the 12th century by French monks, it grew to become a favored sport of French and English monarchs, and later built a reputation in the 20th and 21st centuries as a "rich person" extracurricular. The satirical 1980 Official Preppy Handbook, a cult Gen X "manual" outlining the dos and don’ts of WASPs or "Preppies," identified tennis as a "status quo institution" of the American bourgeoisie, suggesting that the game is actually more of a vehicle for economic and societal advancement: "More deals and wedding proposals are offered on the courts than in any board room, after all."
Though Italian-American furniture designer Harry Bertoia didn’t design his 1952 steel wire seating collection in reference to tennis specifically, the Diamond chair’s grid motif evokes the mesh of a net or the wires of a racquet. The bright-green seat pad also reminds of a tennis court.
Courtesy of Knoll Inc.
Because of its historic association with wealth and privilege (even the Titanic had a tennis court), the sport has been inscribed in the book of classicality, celebrated across artistic genres. American photographer Slim Aarons, famous for his images of the 20th-century jet set, captured tennis culture in his ’50s and ’60s photography. Some of influential British artist David Hockney’s artworks and photos in the ’70s and ’80s depicted scenes at tennis courts and centers. In clothing, tennis aesthetics have cycled through high fashion and casualwear; in cinema, we can look to early 2000s films like The Royal Tenenbaums, Wimbledon, Match Point, and more recently, Challengers as proof that tennis perpetually entertains.
As an influence on interior design and furniture, tennis offers some of the simplest of aesthetics: the lines of a court, the mesh of a net, the grid of a racquet, and the curves of a ball. Straight lines. Curvy lines. It’s basically the recipe for most modernist design. Tennis comes with stiff-lipped decorum—old money, Ivy League, and ironed whites—but in reality, the sport is sweaty, brainy, and cutthroat. (Challengers three-way, anyone?) This dichotomy has inspired designers to interpret its aesthetics. "The finest examples of design convey exquisite craftsmanship and forethought with a simple elegance," says Caitlin Thompson, founder of Racquet, a quarterly magazine dedicated to tennis culture and style. "I can’t think of a better equivalent in sport to that embodiment of juxtaposition than tennis."
Of course, the grid motif has been a design guidepost for ages, generally—from Bertoia’s Diamond chair to the Eames wire chair to the precision-tile bathrooms that dominated the ’80s. But some designers have adapted tennis aesthetics more literally. In 1971, Italian architect-designer Gae Aulenti put out three pieces—a low, curved bed and two rounded floor-seated loungers—dubbed the Tennis Collection. You have to look deeper at these pieces to understand the connection to the game, says David Rosenwasser, cofounder of Rarify, a dealer of authenticated rare furniture. "The [collection] name is derived from the cushions shaped like tennis balls, along with the stitching and rounded shapes found on the corners of the bed," he says. "The template used on the corner of the bed for the upholstery is the same shape as a tennis ball."
Interestingly, Rosenwasser is surprised by the nomenclature of Aulenti’s collection. "I would have actually expected a slightly more literal collection with a name as suggestive as tennis," he says. Especially considering that just a few years later, Aulenti would create the Patroclo lamp with a welded-steel mesh cover that resembles a racquet.
Of all the elements of the game, the tennis ball has historically been the least attractive, thanks to its garish neon hue, which is kind of like the "Laurel/Yanny" of the sports world—some people see green, others see yellow. (Fun fact: Tennis balls were originally white or black, but changed tint in 1978 to make it easier to track the ball on color television.) Either way, designers have even employed the tennis ball as a medium—see the 1970s Tennis Ball Suite by John Quirk, or Dutch designers Tejo Remy and Rene Veenhuizen’s 2002 Ballenbank bench, both of which use the balls to construct seating. In 1985, De Sede produced a chair in the shape of a giant tennis ball for the International Tennis Tournament in Zurich. These pieces are now collector’s items sourced through dealers like 1stDibs, Pamono, and Chairish.
In more recent years, we can look to the Pieces furniture line by Brooklyn-based collective An Aesthetic Pursuit, and their 2018 Court Series of rugs and tables with sports court themes. "We’ve always been passionate about sports," says Pieces cofounder Jenny Kaplan. "From the wide array of graphic design and color palettes [of sports courts], we had so much to work with." The collection yielded two rectangular rugs based on tennis courts—one grass, one clay—as well as an oval rug and a glass table with gridded patterns evoking nets or racquet strings.
The Court Series from Pieces furniture line, inspired by the aesthetics and graphics of sports culture and playing fields, includes a hand-tufted rug designed to look like a clay tennis court.
Photo by Claire Esparros, courtesy Pieces
Tennis’s influence on interiors isn’t limited to the realm of high design with high price tags. A few years ago, Los Angeles handbag designer Clare Vivier did a wallpaper collaboration with Wallshoppe that included a tennis ball print with a peel-and-stick option. Etsy is awash in vintage tennis tchotchkes—from brass bookends to cocktail glasses to catchalls—for $50 or less. (We have the Yuppies to thank for this trove of castoffs.)
Perhaps tennis continues to inspire because of its high/low duality: It may have an air of riches, but Americans are nothing if not hungry for budget-versions and dupes. Case in point: The pickleball craze that gripped America’s millennials and boomers alike (when has that ever happened?), which is very much "tennis but make it easier and cheaper."
Top photo by Slim Aarons/Getty Images, taken at La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club in San Diego, California, in 1960.
Related Reading:
How a Former NFL Player Is Keeping the Past Alive Using Design
