Mae Console

Crump & Kwash, based in Baltimore, Maryland, and founded in 2015, is an interior design studio devoted to the quality manufacturing of modern and Art Deco-style contemporary furniture. Justin Kwash and Paul Crump collaboratively blend 21st-century manufacturing practices with fastidious product development and flawless execution. This dynamic duo leverages their respective artistic and architectural backgrounds to create simple, yet beguiling, well-crafted furniture. 

Kwash began his career making large-scale sculptures, while Crump, a graduate of the Maryland Institute College of Art, started in architecture. They first collaborated while working for an architectural precast company. 

Their pieces have a captivating design flair while being made to last a lifetime. Crump & Kwash have experimented with materials like wood, steel, glass, aluminum and even concrete, always ensuring that their pieces are durable, visually pleasing and comfortable. The result has been a jaw-dropping array of stunning lounge and club chairs, side and end tables, stools, credenzas, dressers and mirrors. Their success allowed them to expand to a new studio in 2020.

Crump & Kwash’s soaring popularity and admirable design accomplishments earned them a place on the American Design Hot List in 2019. Their distinguished list of clients includes Google, Cisco, WeWork, Auto Camp and the New York Public Library. 

On 1stDibs, find Crump & Kwash seating, tables, cabinets and more.

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 The modernists rejected both natural and historical references and relied primarily on industrial materials such as metal, glass, plywood, and, later, plastics.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.