Tom Dixon Bell

Artistic, innovative and entrepreneurial, the self-taught creator Tom Dixon has been a contemporary design-world maverick for more than three decades. From his revolutionary art-meets-design projects of the 1980s and throughout his dynamic and influential career as a designer of furniture, housewares and interiors, the only consistent note has been change. Dixon’s chief fascination is exploring new materials and new ways of constructing things.

Dixon was restless even as a young man. He enjoyed ceramics and drawing in high school but later dropped out of the Chelsea School of Art in London. While repairing his motorcycle in 1983, Dixon learned how to weld and took to the craft. He began making what he has called semi-functional objects from scrap metal (sometime as performance art in a nightclub), then formed a furniture studio–cum–think tank called Creative Salvage. Amid the ritzy excess of the ’80s, Dixon — along with designers such as Tejo Remy and Ron Arad — forged a new, attention-getting aesthetic with furniture made from found materials.

In 1987, Dixon began working for the Italian furniture manufacturer Cappellini, which put his best-known design, the slender, sinuous S chair, into production, followed by such pieces as the Pylon chair (1992), a wire lattice that resembles electrical transmission towers. Starting in the 1990s, Dixon expanded his interests rapidly. He started a company to manufacture the stackable plastic Jack light; joined the housewares retailer Habitat as creative director; and breathed new life into Artek, the venerable Finnish maker that Alvar Aalto and his wife Aino helped cofound. Since 2002, Dixon has run his namesake company fabricating furnishings from novel materials like brass foil-clad wood and “vacuum-metalized” glass.

The hallmark of Dixon’s design is his captivation with the process of creating pieces such as chairs, tables and lighting fixtures. “A kind friend once described me as a ‘vertebrate designer,’” Dixon has said. “That means that I design from the bones outwards and am not really interested in surface.”

Classic Dixon pieces are those that exhibit the manner of their making — from his early work in welded scrap metal to the woven rattan seats and backs of his Fat chair for Cappellini. There are two ways to approach Dixon designs: as a collector, or as a decorator. The former will seek Dixon’s one-off and limited edition works and prototypes. These historical artifacts carry high prices that range from around $8,000 to $50,000 and above. Those more interested in a dynamic look will find that manufactured Dixon designs — such as his Jack lights or his Melt pendant — can be found for prices that range from about $300 to $1,000. Either way, as you will see on 1stDibs, the designs of Tom Dixon have a singular allure that makes them a noteworthy element in any room.

Vintage Space Age furniture captured post–World War II optimism with swooping shapes, bowed lines and experimentation with new materials including plastic and fiberglass.

From the launch of the Sputnik 1 satellite in 1957 to the landing of Apollo 11 astronauts on the moon in 1969, the space race between the Soviet Union and the United States propelled advancements in technology that transformed culture. Space Age design encompassed fashion, architecture, cars, furniture and objects for the home, bringing wonder and hope for the future into everyday life.

Coinciding with Pop art, Space Age style featured bold colors and forms. Eero Aarnio’s Ball chair, which debuted in 1966, used molded fiberglass for a capsule-like space while Verner Panton’s 1959 Panton chair was a single piece of molded plastic for a gravity-defying S shape. Red versions of Olivier Mourgue’s 1964 Djinn chair were futuristic enough to appear on the space station in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Today, Joe Colombo is revered as a master of modern Italian design thanks to the provocative modular furniture pieces he created, such as the Tube chair and the Elda armchair, both of which embody the future-forward spirit of the Space Age.

The Space Age spirit extended to home building too. The futuristic Case Study Houses, which were designed by the likes of Pierre Koenig, Charles and Ray Eames, Richard Neutra and Whitney R. Smith, are considered a high point of modernism and the Southern California lifestyle.

Sometimes the nods to space exploration were more literal, like moon and star motifs or the 1965 Eclisse lamp by Vico Magistretti that saw the mid-century Italian designer integrating a movable inner shade to “eclipse” the light source. Alongside the pioneering moon missions, JVC manufactured the Videosphere portable television reminiscent of the Apollo 11 space helmets.

Although the style faded in the 1970s — with the 1975 joining of the Apollo and Soyuz spacecrafts signaling a new era of cooperation and the global oil crisis impacting the availability of plastics — the era’s innovations influenced designers into the 21st century such as Zaha Hadid and Djivan Schapira.

Find a collection of vintage Space Age seating, tables, lighting and other furniture on 1stDibs.

Arguably the world’s most ubiquitous man-made material, plastic has impacted nearly every industry. In contemporary spaces, new and vintage plastic furniture is quite popular and its use pairs well with a range of design styles.

From the Italian lighting artisans at Fontana Arte to venturesome Scandinavian modernists such as Verner Panton, who created groundbreaking interiors as much as he did seating — see his revolutionary Panton chair — to contemporary multidisciplinary artists like Faye Toogood, furniture designers have been pushing the boundaries of plastic forever.

When The Graduate's Mr. McGuire proclaimed, “There’s a great future in plastics,” it was more than a laugh line. The iconic quote is an allusion both to society’s reliance on and its love affair with plastic. Before the material became an integral part of our lives — used in everything from clothing to storage to beauty and beyond — people relied on earthly elements for manufacturing, a process as time-consuming as it was costly.

Soon after American inventor John Wesley Hyatt created celluloid, which could mimic luxury products like tortoiseshell and ivory, production hit fever pitch, and the floodgates opened for others to explore plastic’s full potential. The material altered the history of design — mid-century modern legends Charles and Ray Eames, Joe Colombo and Eero Saarinen regularly experimented with plastics in the development of tables and chairs, and today plastic furnishings and decorative objects are seen as often indoors as they are outside.

Find vintage plastic lounge chairs, outdoor furniture, lighting and more on 1stDibs.

Chandeliers — simple in form, inspired by candelabras and originally made of wood or iron — first made an appearance in early churches. For those wealthy enough to afford them for their homes in the medieval period, a chandelier's suspended lights likely exuded imminent danger, as lit candles served as the light source for fixtures of the era. Things have thankfully changed since then, and antique and vintage chandeliers and pendant lights are popular in many interiors today.

While gas lighting during the late 18th century represented an upgrade for chandeliers — and gas lamps would long inspire Danish architect and pioneering modernist lighting designer Poul Henningsen — it would eventually be replaced with the familiar electric lighting of today.

The key difference between a pendant light and a chandelier is that a pendant incorporates only a single bulb into its design. Don’t mistake this for simplicity, however. An Art Deco–styled homage to Sputnik from Murano glass artisans Giovanni Dalla Fina (note: there is more than one lighting fixture that shares its name with the iconic mid-century-era satellite — see Gino Sarfatti’s design too), with handcrafted decorative elements supported by a chrome frame, is just one stunning example of the elaborate engineering that can be incorporated into every component of a chandelier.

Chandeliers have evolved over time, but their classic elegance has remained unchanged. Not only will the right chandelier prove impressive in a given room, but it can also offer a certain sense of practicality. These fixtures can easily illuminate an entire space, while their elevated position prevents them from creating glare or straining one’s eyes. Certain materials, like glass, can complement naturally lit settings without stealing the show. Brass, on the other hand, can introduce an alluring, warm glow. While LEDs have earned a bad reputation for their perceived harsh bluish lights and a loss of brightness over their life span, the right design choices can help harness their lighting potential and create the perfect mood. A careful approach to lighting can transform your room into a peaceful and cozy nook, ideal for napping, reading or working.

For midsize spaces, a wall light or sconce can pull the room together and get the lighting job done. Perforated steel rings underneath five bands of handspun aluminum support a rich diffusion of light within Alvar Aalto's Beehive pendant light, but if you’re looking to brighten a more modest room, perhaps a minimalist solution is what you’re after. The mid-century modern furniture designer Charlotte Perriand devised her CP-1 wall lamps in the 1960s, in which a repositioning of sheet-metal plates can redirect light as needed.

The versatility and variability of these lighting staples mean that, when it comes to finding something like the perfect chandelier, you’ll never be left hanging. From the whimsical — like the work of Beau & Bien’s Sylvie Maréchal, frequently inspired by her dreams — to the classic beauty of Paul Ferrante's fixtures, there is a style for every room. With designs for pendant lights and chandeliers across eras, colors and materials, you’ll never run out of options to explore on 1stDibs.