Oscar Maschera Tray

OSCARMASCHERA is a 100% Italian company that was founded in 2005 out of Oscar Maschera and Claudia Serafini’s profound experience in and knowledge of materials.

Surrounded by the timeless and romantic countryside of Pesaro, the two artists convey their creativity through the production of unique, refined items and small pieces of furniture, all made of leather and natural materials. The product range goes from magazine-holder baskets to log-holders and various-sized boxes, from desk accessories and picture frames to benches, poufs, stools, refined mirrors, carpets and lamps. Oscar Maschera collaborates with internationally renowned designers, such as Nestor Perkal, Claude Bouchard and Nathalie du Pasquier.

All OSCARMASCHERA objects are made in full grain leather, which is the outermost layer and most valuable part of the hide. It is an authentic, Italian, vegetable-tanned material (tannins extracted from the bark of certain plants, such as mimosa and chestnut). Processing is traditional: It is a process that requires time and accuracy. The leather must retain all of its characteristics and its history.

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 The modernists rejected both natural and historical references and relied primarily on industrial materials such as metal, glass, plywood, and, later, plastics.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