Edward Wormley for Dunbar Captain Chairs

The Dunbar furniture company and designer Edward J. Wormley (1907–95) transformed American furnishings during the mid-20th century. Both Wormley and Dunbar hailed from the Midwest, and the fruit of their decades-long partnership is characterized by a strong ethos of classical design and the prioritization of well-made materials.

Wormley’s foray into design in the mid-1920s has origins in the correspondence course from New York School of Interior Design that he completed as a high school student as well as a two-year stint at the Art Institute of Chicago. But it was a trip to Paris in 1930 that had a permanent impact on his aesthetic. There, he spent time with architect and furniture maker Le Corbusier and Art Deco master Émile-Jacques Ruhlman. Upon returning to the United States, he landed his first job in the design department at Chicago’s Marshall Field & Company department store.

By 1931, Wormley was hired by Indiana-based Dunbar, and he worked there until the company was sold in 1970. Dunbar initially tasked Wormley with transforming its brand from an inexpensive manufacturer into a more high-minded retailer, and his exemplary work helped solidify the company as a top American furniture producer. Select pieces that Wormley would go on to create for Dunbar were included in the Good Design annual exhibitions of 1951 and 1952. The show was sponsored by the Chicago Merchandise Mart and New York City’s Museum of Modern Art to celebrate home furnishings that exemplified “excellent appearance and progressive performance.”

Manufactured in 1959, Wormley’s A-Frame chair merged his aptitude for creating comfortable seating with his woodworking expertise and appetite for innovation. The chair was a huge hit for Dunbar — its elegant woven caned backrest, leather seat and compass legs positioned it as an attractive, seamless fit for interiors nationwide.

As the longtime director of design for the Dunbar furniture company, Edward Wormley was, along with such peers as George Nelson at Herman Miller Inc., and Florence Knoll of Knoll Inc., one of the leading forces in bringing modern design into American homes in the mid-20th century. Not an axiomatic modernist, Wormley deeply appreciated traditional design, and consequently his work has an understated warmth and a timeless quality that sets it apart from other furnishings of the era.

Wormley was born in rural Illinois and as a teenager took correspondence courses from the New York School of Interior Design. He later attended the Art Institute of Chicago but ran out of money for tuition before he could graduate. Marshall Field hired Wormley in 1930 to design a line of reproduction 18th-century English furniture; the following year he was hired by the Indiana-based Dunbar, where he quickly distinguished himself. It was a good match.

Dunbar was an unusual firm: it did not use automated production systems; its pieces were mostly hand-constructed. For his part, Wormley did not use metal as a major component of furniture; he liked craft elements such as caned seatbacks, tambour drawers, or the woven-wood cabinet fronts seen on his Model 5666 sideboard of 1956. He designed two lines for Dunbar each year — one traditional, one modern — until 1944, by which time the contemporary pieces had become the clear best sellers.

Many of Wormley’s signature pieces — chairs, sofas, tables and more — are modern interpretations of traditional forms. His 1946 Riemerschmid Chair — an example is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art — recapitulates a late 19th-century German design. The long, slender finials of his Model 5580 dining chairs are based on those of Louis XVI chairs; his Listen-to-Me Chaise (1948) has a gentle Rococo curve; the “Precedent” line that Wormley designed for Drexel Furniture in 1947 is a simplified, pared-down take on muscular Georgian furniture. But he could invent new forms, as his Magazine table of 1953, with its bent wood pockets, and his tiered Magazine Tree (1947), both show. And Wormley kept his eye on design currents, creating a series of tables with tops that incorporate tiles and roundels by the great modern ceramicists Otto and Gertrud Natzler.

As the vintage items on 1stDibs demonstrate, Edward Wormley conceived of a subdued sort of modernism, designing furniture that fits into any decorating scheme and does not shout for attention.