Muhly, Indoor/Outdoor Stainless Steel Side Table by Laun

Los Angeles-based design company LAUN creates furniture that brings joy to today’s homes, whether you’re furnishing a garden area or a living room. The studio’s durable modern pieces — lounge chairs, side tables, patio furniture and more — are frequently framed in anodized aluminum or powder-coated stainless steel and feature fun designs that bring a bit of glitz and glamour to today’s exterior spaces as well as to interiors. 

LAUN was founded in 2018 by friends Molly Purnell and Rachel Bullock. Establishing a studio served as the ideal merging of their shared backgrounds in design, metalworking and architecture. Both hold master’s degrees in the latter from the University of Texas at Austin, and both founders manage projects for LAUN’s furniture-focused Object line as well as the firm's Studio arm, which is focused on architecture and interior design.

Bullock told Introspective that the idea to start a company came to them at a mutual friend's thirtieth-birthday pool party. As they surveyed the outdoor furniture, they realized there weren't as many options as for interiors. "We thought people should have pieces that are as appealing for outside as they have for inside," Bullock explained.

The pair got to work and taught themselves to weld. Among their first creations were the powder-coated stainless-steel DeMille chair and the colorful terrazzo Confetti table, both just as suitable for the outside and the inside. They debuted the chair and the table at the 2018 Sight Unseen Offsite fair.

Speaking to Sight Unseen magazine in 2020, Purnell and Bullock noted that much of the inspiration for their work comes from the natural and architectural sights of California (itself a hub of modernist outdoor furniture design in the postwar era) — not only flora and fauna but also the exciting and eclectic buildings, from storybook cottages to Moorish palaces.

The growing company has also brought on Austin-based architect Meegan Beddoe as a partner of LAUN Studio. The three women now at the helm remain committed to offering chic and sturdy furniture to enhance interior and exterior spaces.

On 1stDibs, find LAUN seating, tables and garden furniture.