Known to collectors for his strict adherence to quality with respect to the furniture he manufactured or imported for sale, designer and entrepreneur Maurice Villency brought the highest standards of excellence into his stores. He created and built his own furniture in a loft studio in Manhattan and eventually opened a handful of retail outlets in the New York metro area that offered sleek and stylish furnishings from all over the world.

Villency is among the small business owners that helped introduce the Scandinavian modern style to the United States during the postwar era, when tastemakers really sold Americans on the earthier, homier aspects of Scandinavian design.

Villency also imported pieces from French, Italian and Belgian designers and proudly promoted their fine wares in the showrooms of his four stores. Additional Villency family-owned stores were eventually established and traded under the name Preferred Seating.

Villency was born in Glasgow, Scotland. His father was a cabinetmaker, and when he was 15, his family moved to the U.S. and settled in New York State. At 19, Villency moved to New York City and began working for the Pullman Couch Company.

Villency showed great skill in his work, quickly becoming the plant manager — and later head designer – for the furniture company. In the early 1930s, Pullman moved their entire operations to Chicago, and Villency chose to stay behind. Determined to follow his own path, Villency opened a workshop on 8th Street in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village neighborhood and found increasing success.

Like the Danish cabinetmakers he so admired, Villency designed chairs and other pieces and worked with fine woods such as teak, a sought-after material among mid-century modern designers. Early on, he made an impression with a sectional sofa he designed, and he would later tout the versatile appeal of sectional sofas and other modular furniture in full-page print ads for his retail locations. On a good day, a prospective buyer could stroll into Maurice Villency and find designs by French brand Roche Bobois, Danish manufacturer Farsø Stolefabrik, American modernist Milo Baughman and more.

Maurice’s company eventually came to be called Villency Design Group and today, his grandson Eric Villency — who works in product design, interiors and more — is CEO.

On 1stDibs, find vintage Maurice Villency tables, storage pieces and seating.

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

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 sofas for You

Black leather, silk velvet cushions, breathable bouclé fabric — when shopping for antique, new or vintage sofas, today’s couch connoisseurs have much to choose from in terms of style and shape. But it wasn’t always thus.

The sofa is typically defined as a long upholstered seat that features a back and arms and is intended for two or more people. While the term “couch” comes from the Old French couche, meaning to lie down, and sofa has Eastern origins, both are forms of divan, a Turkish word that means an elongated cushioned seat. No matter how you spell it, sofa just means comfort, at least it does today.

In the early days of sofa design, upholstery consisted of horsehair or dried moss. Sofas that originated in countries such as France during the 17th century were more integral to decor than they were to comfort. Like most Baroque furnishings from the region, they frequently comprised heavy, gilded mahogany frames and were upholstered in floral Beauvais tapestry. Today, options abound when it comes to style and material, with authentic leather offerings and classy steel settees. Plush, velvet chesterfields represent the platonic ideal of coziness.

Vladimir Kagan’s iconic sofa designs, such as the Crescent and the Serpentine — which, like the sectional sofas of the 1960s created by furniture makers such as Harvey Probber, are quite popular among mid-century modern furniture enthusiasts — showcase the spectrum of style available to modern consumers. Those looking to make a statement can turn to Studio 65’s lip-shaped Bocca sofa, which was inspired by the work of Salvador Dalí. Elsewhere, the furniture of the 1970s evokes an era when experimentation ruled, or at least provided a reason to break the rules. Just about every area of society felt a sudden urge to be wayward, to push boundaries — and buttons. Vintage leather sofas of that decade are characterized by a rare blending of the showy and organic.

With so many options, it’s important to explore and find the perfect furniture for your space. Paying attention to the lines of the cushions as well as the flow from the backrest into the arms is crucial to identifying a cohesive new piece for your home or office.

Fortunately, with styles from every era — and even round sofas — there’s a luxurious piece for every space. Deck out your living room with an Art Deco lounge or go retro with a nostalgic '80s design. No matter your sitting vision, the right piece is waiting for you in the expansive collection of unique sofas on 1stDibs.