Italian Post Modern Coffee Table
21st Century and Contemporary Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Ta...
Stoneware
Vintage 1980s Italian Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Metal
Vintage 1970s Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Travertine, Metal
Late 20th Century Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Steel
Vintage 1980s Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Marble, Metal, Chrome
Early 2000s Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Steel
Early 2000s Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Steel
Early 2000s Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Metal
Late 20th Century Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Wood
Vintage 1980s Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Glass, Epoxy Resin
Early 2000s Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Plexiglass
Late 20th Century Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Breccia Marble
1990s Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Glass, Wood
Late 20th Century Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Steel
Vintage 1980s Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Metal
Vintage 1970s Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Wood, Lacquer
Vintage 1970s Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Glass, Plexiglass
1990s Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Metal
Vintage 1980s Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Marble, Iron
21st Century and Contemporary Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Ta...
Plexiglass
Vintage 1980s Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Marble
Vintage 1980s Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Travertine
Mid-20th Century Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Marble
Mid-20th Century Italian Mid-Century Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Aluminum
20th Century Italian Mid-Century Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Glass
Vintage 1970s Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Crystal, Steel
Vintage 1970s Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Plastic, Wood
Mid-20th Century American Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Marble
1990s Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Travertine
Late 20th Century Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Stainless Steel
1990s Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Resin
20th Century Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Stone, Travertine
Vintage 1980s Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Concrete
Vintage 1970s Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Metal, Brass
Vintage 1970s Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Travertine
Vintage 1980s Italian Organic Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Stone, Travertine, Marble
Vintage 1980s Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Travertine
1990s Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Metal
Late 20th Century American Hollywood Regency Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Aluminum
Vintage 1970s Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Aluminum
Vintage 1980s Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Wood
Late 20th Century Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Travertine
1990s Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Concrete
Vintage 1960s Italian Mid-Century Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Glass, Walnut
Vintage 1970s Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Marble
Vintage 1970s Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Lacquer
Vintage 1970s Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Metal
Vintage 1970s Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Travertine
Vintage 1980s Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Glass, Wood, Pine
Vintage 1970s European Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Granite
20th Century Italian Mid-Century Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Brass
Vintage 1980s Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Steel
1990s Italian Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Iron
1990s Italian Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Iron
1990s Italian Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Iron
1990s Italian Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Iron
Vintage 1980s Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Granite, Brass, Steel
1990s Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Steel
Vintage 1970s Italian Mid-Century Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Metal, Chrome
Vintage 1980s Italian Post-Modern Coffee and Cocktail Tables
Crystal
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Italian Post Modern Coffee Table For Sale on 1stDibs
How Much is an Italian Post Modern Coffee Table?
A Close Look at Post-modern Furniture
Postmodern design was a short-lived movement that manifested itself chiefly in Italy and the United States in the early 1980s. The characteristics of vintage postmodern furniture and other postmodern objects and decor for the home included loud-patterned, usually plastic surfaces; strange proportions, vibrant colors and weird angles; and a vague-at-best relationship between form and function.
ORIGINS OF POSTMODERN FURNITURE DESIGN
- Emerges during the 1960s; popularity explodes during the ’80s
- A reaction to prevailing conventions of modernism by mainly American architects
- Architect Robert Venturi critiques modern architecture in his Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966)
- Theorist Charles Jencks, who championed architecture filled with allusions and cultural references, writes The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977)
- Italian design collective the Memphis Group, also known as Memphis Milano, meets for the first time (1980)
- Memphis collective debuts more than 50 objects and furnishings at Salone del Milano (1981)
- Interest in style declines, minimalism gains steam
CHARACTERISTICS OF POSTMODERN FURNITURE DESIGN
- Dizzying graphic patterns and an emphasis on loud, off-the-wall colors
- Use of plastic and laminates, glass, metal and marble; lacquered and painted wood
- Unconventional proportions and abundant ornamentation
- Playful nods to Art Deco and Pop art
POSTMODERN FURNITURE DESIGNERS TO KNOW
- Ettore Sottsass
- Robert Venturi
- Alessandro Mendini
- Michele de Lucchi
- Michael Graves
- Nathalie du Pasquier
VINTAGE POSTMODERN FURNITURE ON 1STDIBS
Critics derided postmodern design as a grandstanding bid for attention and nothing of consequence. Decades later, the fact that postmodernism still has the power to provoke thoughts, along with other reactions, proves they were not entirely correct.
Postmodern design began as an architectural critique. Starting in the 1960s, a small cadre of mainly American architects began to argue that modernism, once high-minded and even noble in its goals, had become stale, stagnant and blandly corporate. Later, in Milan, a cohort of creators led by Ettore Sottsass and Alessandro Mendini — a onetime mentor to Sottsass and a key figure in the Italian Radical movement — brought the discussion to bear on design.
Sottsass, an industrial designer, philosopher and provocateur, gathered a core group of young designers into a collective in 1980 they called Memphis. Members of the Memphis Group, which would come to include Martine Bedin, Michael Graves, Marco Zanini, Shiro Kuramata, Michele de Lucchi and Matteo Thun, saw design as a means of communication, and they wanted it to shout. That it did: The first Memphis collection appeared in 1981 in Milan and broke all the modernist taboos, embracing irony, kitsch, wild ornamentation and bad taste.
Memphis works remain icons of postmodernism: the Sottsass Casablanca bookcase, with its leopard-print plastic veneer; de Lucchi’s First chair, which has been described as having the look of an electronics component; Martine Bedin’s Super lamp: a pull-toy puppy on a power-cord leash. Even though it preceded the Memphis Group’s formal launch, Sottsass’s iconic Ultrafragola mirror — in its conspicuously curved plastic shell with radical pops of pink neon — proves striking in any space and embodies many of the collective’s postmodern ideals.
After the initial Memphis show caused an uproar, the postmodern movement within furniture and interior design quickly took off in America. (Memphis fell out of fashion when the Reagan era gave way to cool 1990’s minimalism.) The architect Robert Venturi had by then already begun a series of plywood chairs for Knoll Inc., with beefy, exaggerated silhouettes of traditional styles such as Queen Anne and Chippendale. In 1982, the new firm Swid Powell enlisted a group of top American architects, including Frank Gehry, Richard Meier, Stanley Tigerman and Venturi to create postmodern tableware in silver, ceramic and glass.
On 1stDibs, the vintage postmodern furniture collection includes chairs, coffee tables, sofas, decorative objects, table lamps and more.
Finding the Right Coffee-tables-cocktail-tables for You
As a practical focal point in your living area, antique and vintage coffee tables and cocktail tables are an invaluable addition to any interior.
Low tables that were initially used as tea tables or coffee tables have been around since at least the mid- to late-1800s. Early coffee tables surfaced in Victorian-era England, likely influenced by the use of tea tables in Japanese tea gardens. In the United States, furniture makers worked to introduce low, long tables into their offerings as the popularity of coffee and “coffee breaks” took hold during the late 19th century and early 20th century.
It didn’t take long for coffee tables and cocktail tables to become a design staple and for consumers to recognize their role in entertaining no matter what beverages were being served. Originally, these tables were as simple as they are practical — as high as your sofa and made primarily of wood. In recent years, however, metal, glass and plastics have become popular in coffee tables and cocktail tables, and design hasn’t been restricted to the conventional low profile, either.
Visionary craftspeople such as Paul Evans introduced bold, geometric designs that challenge the traditional idea of what a coffee table can be. The elongated rectangles and wide boxy forms of Evans’s desirable Cityscape coffee table, for example, will meet your needs but undoubtedly prove imposing in your living space.
If you’re shopping for an older coffee table to bring into your home — be it an antique Georgian-style coffee table made of mahogany or walnut with decorative inlays or a classic square mid-century modern piece comprised of rosewood designed by the likes of Ettore Sottsass — there are a few things you should keep in mind.
Both the table itself and what you put on it should align with the overall design of the room, not just by what you think looks fashionable in isolation. According to interior designer Tamara Eaton, the material of your vintage coffee table is something you need to consider. “With a glass coffee table, you also have to think about the surface underneath, like the rug or floor,” she says. “With wood and stone tables, you think about what’s on top.”
Find the perfect centerpiece for any room, no matter what your personal furniture style on 1stDibs — shop Art Deco coffee tables, travertine coffee tables and other antique and vintage coffee tables and cocktail tables today.