Incollect Magazine - Issue 11

Incollect Magazine 63 o one did more to shape modern American homes in the 1930s and 1940s than T.H. (Terence Harold) Robsjohn-Gibbings, a brilliant, often overlooked figure in the history of design. Born in Britain in 1905, Robsjohn-Gibbings studied architecture before landing a job with Charles Duveen, the influential London decorator and dealer in rare antiques and brother of the famous art dealer Lord Duveen. He moved to the United States to manage Duveen’s New York office but soon after opened his own shop on Madison Avenue. He found swift success as an interior designer and over the following decades designed interiors for top celebrities including Greta Garbo, Elizabeth Arden, Alfred Knopf, and Doris Duke. Robsjohn-Gibbings was averse to prevailing taste among the American elite for 18th and 19th-century European furniture, which he viewed as anachronistic and unsuited to contemporary living. He embraced modern, more informal living and emphasized comfort and functionality over opulence and ornament. But unlike his modernist contemporaries, Charles Eames, Eero Saarinen, or Florence Knoll, for example, he disdained what he saw as the “sterile utilitarianism” of mid- century modern design and sought instead to mine classical Greek and Roman design principles for his creations. He pioneered the paradoxical idea of “modern classic” furniture and in this way eased the broader transition to modernism. Robsjohn-Gibbings’ design philosophy can be summed up this way: he believed simplicity and elegance were the basis of beauty and a feeling of comfort and functionality in design — qualities that have made his furniture enduringly popular. He prized handmade and artisanal work over mass production, and favored natural materials such as wood, metal, and stone. His designs exude simplicity, clean lines and sweeping curved shapes, especially for chair or table legs, with subtle or no ornamentation beyond a preference for varnishes that dulled wood grains. He opposed angular forms and disdained the use of steel, glass, plastic and other new industrial materials that were favored in the work of many of his design contemporaries. “He was a designer who looked back to move forward and that is what made him so great,” says Jake Baer, Chief Executive Officer of Newel based in New York. Baer, a Mesa Table for Widdicomb, ca. 1952. Walnut. Released in a collection influenced by the American Southwest, this massive, freeform, three-tiered table measured 8'9" × 6'4" . Photo courtesy of Donzella.