Set of Four Charles Hollis Jones Dining Chairs with Jack Lenor Larsen Fabric

Jack Lenor Larsen was a celebrated American mid-century modern textile designer born in Seattle. He fostered connections throughout the design and architecture industries beginning in 1950, and today, his influential eponymous design company is widely recognized for its muted hand-spun textured textiles. Larsen manufactured fabrics all over the world for more than six decades, using both traditional and modern weaving techniques.

Larsen initially studied in the architecture program at the University of Washington before he quickly realized he was instead interested in furniture design and interiors. He earned his MFA in 1949 from the Cranbrook Academy of Art — the go-to art school for design stars of the mid-20th century. The following year he moved and opened a studio in New York City where he launched his career. 

For one of his first commissions, which was to design curtains for the Lever House — a New York City icon designed by Gordon Bunshaft and Natalie de Blois — Larsen created a linen and gold metal-themed weave to complement the building’s famed glass walls. He designed similarly magnificent textiles for the Phoenix Opera House, the Wolf Trap Theater and more.

Nowhere is Larsen’s profound impact on textile design more evident than at LongHouse Reserve, his house in East Hampton, New York. Modeled after a seventh-century Shinto Shrine, the home and its surrounding sculpture gardens opened to the public in 1992. 

Larsen built LongHouse Reserve in collaboration with Charles Forberg. The property features sliding panels that showcase the revered artisan’s fabrics as well as works by Lucie Rie, Wharton Esherick, and Edward Wormley. The gardens feature sculptures by Willem de Kooning, Sol LeWitt and Yoko Ono.

Larsen had a solo exhibit at the Louvre in 1981. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. 

Find vintage Jack Lenor Larsen lounge chairs, sofas, and dining room chairs on 1stDibs.

The now omnipresent design use of acrylic and Lucite owes much of its enduring popularity to seasoned creative Charles Hollis Jones. Nicknamed “Mr. Lucite,” the California-based furniture designer and artist made his reputation — and contributed to a lasting legacy for a material one might not immediately consider highbrow — with chairs, tables and other furnishings in the substance scientifically known as polymethyl methacrylate. But while the connecting thread through Jones’s body of work is the presence of translucent materials, his designs are anything but one-note.

The son of an Indiana carpenter, Jones has always been fascinated with structure and reinventing expected ones in new ways. He began working with furniture manufacturers while still a teenager and came to prominence in the 1960s and ’70s, researching and experimenting with techniques to shape acrylic into unconventional forms. “If I design a T-A-B-L-E without thinking of the name, then I can pretend I’ve never seen one,” he told PIN-UP magazine. His design combinations run the gamut from Lucite, brass and glass on elegant dining tables to more unusual applications of Lucite as legs for upholstered sofas and frames for Tibetan fur chairs.

Jones’s work is as varied as his client list, which has included Frank Sinatra, Sylvester Stallone and the Kardashians. For Tennessee Williams, he created a writing chair called the Wisteria chair. Jones also collaborated several times with modernist architect John Lautner, designing furniture that seemed to disappear into its surroundings.

He resides in Los Angeles, where he still designs today.

Find a range of new and vintage Charles Hollis Jones furniture on 1stdibs.