Le Dome Table by Charle Hollis Jones from the Dorothy McGuire Estate

The pioneers of modern furniture design in America in the mid-20th century all had their moments of flamboyance: Charles and Ray Eames produced the startling, biomorphic La Chaise; George Nelson’s firm created the Marshmallow sofa; Edward Wormley had his decadent Listen to Me chaise. But no designer of the day steadily offered works with more verve and dynamism than Vladimir Kagan. While others, it seems, designed with suburban households in mind, Kagan aimed to suit the tastes of young, sophisticated city-dwellers. With signature designs that feature sleekly curved frames and others that have dramatic out-thrust legs, Kagan made furniture sexy.

Kagan’s father was a Russian master cabinetmaker who took his family first to Germany (where Vladimir was born) and then to New York in 1938. After studying architecture at Columbia University, Kagan opened a design firm at age 22 and immediately made a splash with his long, low and sinuous Serpentine sofa. Furniture lines such as the Tri-symmetric group of glass-topped, three-legged tables and the vivacious Contours chairs soon followed.

Kagan’s choices of form and materials evolved through subsequent decades, embracing lucite, aluminum and burl-wood veneers. By the late 1960s, Kagan was designing austere, asymmetrical cabinets and his Omnibus group of modular sofas and chairs. For all his aesthetic élan, Kagan said that throughout his career, his touchstone was comfort. “A lot of modern furniture was not comfortable. And so comfort is: form follows function. The function was to make it comfortable,” he once commented. “I created what I called vessels for the human body.”

A diverse group of bodies have made themselves at home with Kagan designs. Among the famous names who commissioned and collected his designs are Marilyn Monroe, Gary Cooper, Andy Warhol, David Lynch, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, and firms such as Gucci and Giorgio Armani. His work is in numerous museum collections, including those of the Victoria & Albert and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Because of its idiosyncrasy, Kagan’s work did not lend itself to mass-production. Kagan never signed on with any of the major furniture-making corporations, and examples of his designs are relatively rare. As you will see from the offerings on 1stDibs, even decades after their conception, Kagan pieces still command the eye, with their freshness, energy, sensuality and wit.

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.