the Great Marcello Fantoni

Marcello Fantoni 1915-  received a master's in art in 1934, started working as a ceramist in 1937 and established the Fantoni Ceramic Studio winning awards at the Florentine Arts and Craft Exhibit in 1937.  During WWII he worked with the resistance.  After the war in he began to work with renewed vigor that led him to having over 50 collaborators in his shop a decade later.  Many of these became famous in their own right.

His work was in line with contemporary trend in the artistic world using innovative handling of materials, glazing and his colors.  His works were picked up by collectors of modern design and held among the collections in some of the most important museums all around the world.


  He worked in metal as well as in Ceramics.  iihenext decade the impressive size of over fifty collaborators

Edward J Wormley and Dunbar Mid Twentieth Century Design

book on Edward Wormley

 In 1950 Chicago Merchandise Mart joined with the Museum of Modern Art to sponsor the GOOD DESIGN exhibition.  Edward J Wormley, who designed for the Dunbar Furniture Company, became an icon in American design and furniture history.  This annual show was designed to commend selected home furnishings for their “excellent appearance and progressive performance.”  Over a three year period Wormley's designs for Dunbar dominated the exhibition collecting 30 awards for their "Good Designs".

set of Wormley slipper chairs original fabric sold from our shop

It was in 1931 that Wormley, a twenty three year old with fresh ideas, joined up with Dunbar Furniture.  Wormley, with a passion for quality and an eye for detail, inspired global perspective and introduced world-class design philosophies into the American home furnishing. The U. S. had been lagging behind the Europeans in forward thinking for functional furnishing for the modern home. He up dated how American Interiors should feel, with his clean lines a passion for details.  Dunbar was the perfect vehicle for his pieces and his forward thinking.  He is known for reinterpreting historical and classical designs into clean modern designs, thus creating the new classics.  There was a retrospective of his work in 1997, two years after his death, bringing renewed interest to his designs.  Dunbar has even began to reissue some of his designs.

magazine stand by Wormley for Dunbar

Edward Wormley

Edward Wormley - American, 1907 - 1995

“Modernism means freedom—freedom to mix, to choose, to change, to embrace the new but to hold fast to what is good.”

We can be forever grateful to Wormley and to Dunbar for his thoughtful modern designs.

Ico Parisi

http://www.1stdibs.com/furniture_item_detail.php?id=549509

It takes getting in new pieces by mid twentieth century designers for me to try to find out about the designers.  We found a table by Ico Parisi, recently.  So now for the investigating.  Ico Parisi was born in 1916 and is still alive.  He considered himself a Renaissance man.  He was an architect, a furniture designer, a painter, and a photographer.  He did not want to be know just as any one of these things, but for all of his accomplishments.

A larger version of the table we found this one listed by Lampedo

He met Luisa Aiani, a pupil of Gio Ponti, and married her.  Together they were an unbeatable design team. They formed La Ruota, a studio specialized in interior design where they drew up designs for accessories as well as furniture. Their furniture was cutting edge to fit into the new modern buildings and homes of the period, and today still seems to have that cutting edge quality.

A rare "Taormina" chest of drawers by Luisa & Ico Parisi for MIM presented by Lampedo