Beautifully Distressed Frank Lloyd Wright & Warren McArthur Biltmore Cafe Table

Few 20th-century designers had influential furniture that regularly flew at 30,000 feet, but Warren McArthur did. His work on seating for military aircraft came near the end of his career, following decades of Machine Age furniture shaped from tubular forms and made of steel, chrome and aluminum.

Warren McArthur Jr. graduated with an engineering degree from Cornell University in 1908. After moving to Los Angeles in 1929, he founded the Warren McArthur Corporation a year later. His initial output of sleek, metal designs were popular in offices and hotels. 

At the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, Americans witnessed a new “Streamlined America” campaign, which included everyday furniture made from metal, opening the door for McArthur and other Machine Age designers to a residential audience. With this increase in demand for metal furniture, the Warren McArthur Corporation relocated to Rome, New York, and sold their aluminum furnishings out of a showroom on Park Avenue in New York City. 

Actors Marlene Dietrich, Fredric March and Clark Gable were among his A-list clientele. McArthur also produced furniture for the dining cars on the Union Pacific Railroad and the Chrysler Headquarters. His designs were featured in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1934 exhibition “Contemporary American Industrial Art.”

During World War II, McArthur pivoted production after a ban on the private use of aluminum. McArthur made an estimated three-quarters of all American military aircraft seating, including adjustable seats for the Beechcraft C-45 and revolving seats for navigators aboard the Grumman HU-16 Albatross. 

Warren McArthur closed his business in 1948. He died in 1961.

On 1stDibs, find vintage Warren McArthur armchairs, tables and other seating.

Without question the greatest architect the United States has ever produced, Frank Lloyd Wright and his philosophy of “organic architecture” — of buildings that exist in harmony with their natural surroundings — had a profound influence on the shape of modern life.

Wright gave us some of the most elegant and iconic buildings in America: residences such as Fallingwater, in rural Pennsylvania, the Robie House in Chicago, and Taliesin, Wright’s own home; and masterful institutional structures that include the Unity Temple in Oak Park, Illinois, the Johnson Wax headquarters in Racine, Wisconsin, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Whenever possible, Wright designed the furniture for his projects, to ensure an affinity between a building’s exterior and interior.

Wright’s wooden chairs and tables for his “Prairie Houses” of the early 1900s have sleek, attenuated forms, influenced by both the simplicity of traditional Japanese design and the work of Gustav Stickley and other designers of the Arts and Crafts movement.

For Taliesin and several residential projects, Wright designed severely geometric chairs that are marvels of reductivist design. He revisited many of these forms in the 1950s in furniture licensed to the North Carolina firm Henredon, adding a decorative frieze-like element to the edges of tables and stools. Owing to a cross-licensing agreement between Henredon and Heritage at the time, Wright's lines of the era are usually labeled Heritage-Henredon.

The works on 1stDibs also show how happily Wright embraced new forms and materials. His desks and chairs for Johnson Wax have a streamlined look and use tubular steel to the same effect as designer Warren McArthur, who collaborated with Wright in the interiors of the Arizona Biltmore Hotel. For the Price Tower (1956) in Oklahoma, Wright designed angular wooden desks as well as upholstered pedestal chairs made of chromed steel — audacious furniture for his tallest completed building project.

The beauty of Frank Lloyd Wright’s furniture designs is that while many of us wish we could live in one of his houses, his vintage sofas, storage cabinets and armchairs connect us directly to his architecture, and to the history he made.