Brown Jordan Havana

Pioneers of furniture designed especially for the outdoors, Brown Jordan channeled — in tables, lounge chairs and armchairs — the carefree postwar California spirit and helped create a new space in American life: the patio.

The outdoor furniture brand began to take shape in 1945, when Robert Brown, an industrial designer, and Hubert Jordan met in Pasadena, California, and began collaborating on their first design, a traditional wrought-iron breakfast set they called Morning Glory. They offered it for sale via the upscale department store Bullock’s Wilshire. The store ran an ad about the new outdoor set, and, by the end of the day, it had sold out completely.

A few years later, in 1948, the duo followed up with a new, very different design: the Leisure collection, one of the first to combine aluminum with vinyl “lace.” The materials were newly available after the war and offered a mid-century silhouette that was also lightweight and specifically designed for outdoor use. Some of Brown Jordan’s most singular pieces arose from another postwar material: Copper piping salvaged from ships that had sunk at Pearl Harbor was used to create sculptural, curvilinear outdoor furnishings as part of the Walter Lamb Bronze collection, which was first launched in the 1940s.

The Tamiami collection, by Brown Jordan in-house designer Hall Bradley, followed in the 1950s, with streamlined aluminum frames and vinyl seats and backs woven in a diagonal pattern. The line quickly became popular not only in California but across the country and on the East Coast, prompting an expansion from the original two colorways to a wider assortment of of-the-moment hues.

Brown Jordan’s offerings gained recognition as both innovations and symbols of a new kind of leisure. Tadao Inouye’s Kantan lounge chair, launched in 1956, was chosen by the Department of Commerce to be exhibited at the 1959 Industrial World’s Fair in Tokyo. In 1968, it was featured in the Cooper Hewitt’s “Please Be Seated” exhibit.

Bright colorways, metallics, pastels, powder coating and weather-ready materials became some of Brown Jordan’s hallmarks, heralding durable, design-forward furniture that helped create the modern idea of outdoor living.

Find a collection of vintage Brown Jordan furniture today on 1stDibs.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw sweeping social change and major scientific advances — both of which contributed to a new aesthetic: modernism. Rejecting the rigidity of Victorian artistic conventions, modernists sought a new means of expression. References to the natural world and ornate classical embellishments gave way to the sleek simplicity of the Machine Age. Architect Philip Johnson characterized the hallmarks of modernism as “machine-like simplicity, smoothness or surface [and] avoidance of ornament.”

Early practitioners of modernist design include the De Stijl (“The Style”) group, founded in the Netherlands in 1917, and the Bauhaus School, founded two years later in Germany.

Followers of both groups produced sleek, spare designs — many of which became icons of daily life in the 20th century. The modernists rejected both natural and historical references and relied primarily on industrial materials such as metal, glass, plywood, and, later, plastics. While Bauhaus principals Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe created furniture from mass-produced, chrome-plated steel, American visionaries like Charles and Ray Eames worked in materials as novel as molded plywood and fiberglass. Today, Breuer’s Wassily chair, Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona chair — crafted with his romantic partner, designer Lilly Reich — and the Eames lounge chair are emblems of progressive design and vintage originals are prized cornerstones of collections.

It’s difficult to overstate the influence that modernism continues to wield over designers and architects — and equally difficult to overstate how revolutionary it was when it first appeared a century ago. But because modernist furniture designs are so simple, they can blend in seamlessly with just about any type of décor. Don’t overlook them.