Philippe Starck Bookshelf

A ubiquitous name in the world of contemporary architecture and design, Philippe Starck has created everything from hotel interiors and luxury yachts to toothbrushes and teakettles. Yet for every project in his diverse portfolio, Starck has maintained an instantly recognizable signature style: a look that is dynamic, sleek, fluid and witty.

The son of an aircraft engineer, Starck studied interior design at the École Nissim de Camondo in Paris. He started his design career in the 1970s decorating nightclubs in the city, and his reputation for spirited and original interiors earned him a commission in 1983 from French president François Mitterrand to design the private apartments of the Élysée Palace. Starck made his name internationally in 1988 with his design for the interiors of the Royalton Hotel in New York, a strikingly novel environment featuring jewel-toned carpeting and upholstery and furnishings with organically shaped cast-aluminum frames. He followed that up in 1990 with an equally impressive redesign of the Paramount Hotel in Manhattan, a project that featured over-scaled furniture as well as headboards that mimicked Old Masters paintings.

Like their designer, furniture pieces by Starck seem to enjoy attention. Designs such as the wedge-shaped J Series club chair; the sweeping molded-mahogany Costes chair; the provocative Ara table lamp; or the sinuous WW stool never fail to raise eyebrows. Other Starck pieces make winking postmodern references to historical designs. His polycarbonate Louis Ghost armchair puts a new twist on Louis XVI furniture; his Out-In chair offers a futuristic take on the classic English high-back chair. But for all his flair, Starck maintains a populist vision of design. While one of his limited-edition Prince de Fribourg et Treyer armchairs might be priced at $7,000, a plastic Starck chair for the Italian firm Kartell is available for around $250. As you will see on 1stDibs, Philippe Starck’s furniture makes a bold statement — and it can add a welcome bit of humor to even the most traditional decor.

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.