Featured Collections
Define Your Living Space with an Accent Chair
Living room accent chairs toe the line between form and function, offering visual interest and additional seating. Explore the different sizes and styles to find the perfect seat for your space.
Choose the Right Sofa or Sectional for Your Space
The best sofas and sectionals are inviting and comfortable, but they don’t compromise on style – and neither should you. Discover superior seating for living rooms of all sizes.
Find the Perfect Accent Table for Your Living Room
A modern accent table serves as a gathering place for game night, catch-all for cocktail glasses, and display place for decorative objects. Consult our comprehensive guide to select the coffee table that fits your needs.
Choose the Right Dining Room Furniture for Your Home
Not just for savoring a meal – today’s dining tables often pull double duty as home offices. Browse dining table shapes that maximize space and help improve traffic flow in your home.
New Modern Furniture Arrivals
What Is Modern Furniture?
Though the term “modern” refers to anything of the present age, modern furniture isn't defined as simply. To some, modern furniture describes contemporary furniture with sleek, of-the-moment features. And to others, it’s a more specific denotation identifying furniture designed during the mid-20th century, associated with a wider design movement. In DWR’s assortment, you’ll discover modern furniture of all kinds, from iconic, authentic mid-century modern furniture designs to minimalist and contemporary furniture pieces by up-and-coming brands and designers.
Modern Furniture’s Mid-Century Origins
In the early-to-mid-1900s, architects and furniture designers began innovating clean-lined, “modern” furniture pieces that stood in deliberate opposition to tradition. Termed mid-century modern furniture (sometimes abbreviated MCM furniture) in 1984, furnishings from this period reflected the growing popularity of modernism, a movement that prioritized function and ease of production over traditional opulence and time-consuming embellishment. But despite their relative simplicity, mid-century modern designs were by no means boring. In defying convention, MCM designers got creative, bending and molding then-contemporary materials like plywood and plastic into unique, playful shapes so distinct that many mid-century modern chairs can still be recognized by their silhouettes alone.
Ushered in by world-class designers from around the globe, the 20th century modern design umbrella eventually grew to encompass other modern styles, including International, Bauhaus, Scandinavian, and minimalist, highlighted within the breadth of assortment at Design Within Reach.
Pioneering Mid-Century Modern Designers & Their Iconic Furniture Designs
Charles & Ray Eames
There is hardly a body of work more representative of mid-century modern furniture design than that of husband-and-wife design team Charles and Ray Eames. Their eponymous designs, including the ever-famous Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman, are known for their playful shapes and pioneering materials (like their signature bent plywood and molded fiberglass), as well as their everyday purpose and comfort. The Eames’ designs helped make Herman Miller the icon of modern home and office furniture that it still is today. At DWR, shop all categories of their pioneering designs, including the Eames Soft Pad Chair, Eames Molded Plastic Side Chair, and the Eames Hang-It-All
Florence Knoll Bassett
Florence Knoll (née Florence Schust) was an architect and furniture designer whose holistic, modernist approach to interior design saw her become one of the most influential designers in the movement. With her company, Knoll, she redesigned modern offices in the “Knoll Look,” a design identity that is largely synonymous with the mid-century modern style we know today. Over the course of her career, she studied under, worked with, or employed some of the biggest names in modern design, including Alvar Aalto, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Harry Bertoia, and Isamu Noguchi. Knoll also designed furniture herself, including the Florence Knoll Sofa shown above. Knoll survives today as one of the most prominent modern furniture companies in the world.
Eero Saarinen
Finnish-American designer Eero Saarinen is perhaps best known for his prolific work as a modernist architect, having designed spacey and iconic projects such as New York's TWA Flight Center at JFK International Airport and the St. Louis Gateway Arch. But he also contributed some of the grooviest and most futuristic furniture designs to the mid-century modern design ethos, including the Womb Chair, Tulip Table, and Tulip Chairs, no doubt both inspiring and inspired by his peers, Charles Eames and Florence Knoll.
George Nelson
Seminal modernist architect George Nelson was hired as director of design at American furniture company Herman Miller without yet having designed any furniture. This risk paid off, as under Nelson, Herman Miller would produce some of its most famous mid-century modern furniture pieces (and its iconic logo), designed by Nelson recruits Isamu Noguchi, Charles and Ray Eames, and Alexander Girard. Now known as “the designer of modern design,” Nelson’s own creations, his Nelson Bubble Lamps, Nelson Bench, and Nelson Clocks, would, too, become grails of modern design.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
German architect and designer Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was a modernist pioneer, having begun modernizing his design style in Germany in the early 1920s. He was the last director of the influential Bauhaus design school, with his furniture designs from this period, including the Barcelona Chair, Tugendhat Chair, and Brno Chair, becoming symbols of the Bauhaus and International Styles. He joined Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer in ushering modernist design to the United States before the mid-century.
Arne Jacobsen
Copenhagen-born Arne Jacobsen was a central figure in Danish modern design, a minimalist, Bauhaus-inspired style. Trained as a mason and architect, Jacobsen approached furniture design with a mindset rooted in modernism, influenced by Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The fluid silhouette of his most famous design, the Egg Chair, exemplifies the Danish modern design’s organic functionalism. Despite calling himself first and foremost an architect, Jacobsen’s furniture and lighting work for Fritz Hansen and Louis Poulsen profoundly influenced later Scandinavian furniture designers, including Hans Wegner and Verner Panton.
What Features Define Modern Furniture?
Innovative Materials
Unconventional Characteristics
What Is Contemporary Furniture?
Modern furniture design may sometimes be confused or used interchangeably with contemporary furniture design, but the two are not traditionally considered synonymous. While modern design refers to a design style that was popular during a specific period, contemporary design has a dynamic definition – it refers to whatever design style is presently popular.
Often, modern contemporary furniture design is an amalgamation of on-trend silhouettes, materials, color palettes, social initiatives, and other characteristics of popular interior design styles. Today, contemporary design blends elements of mid-century modern, Scandinavian, and minimalist styles, with an added focus on dramatic lighting, advanced technological elements, and ultra-sleek finishes.
Contemporary Modern Design Styles for Different Ways of Life
Nordic Minimalist
With roots in Danish design and Japanese minimalism, Nordic Minimalism embraces warmth and restraint. Like other modern design styles, Nordic Minimalism features pared-down, clean-lined designs chosen primarily for their function and the value they can add to one’s life. Monochromatic black-and-white color schemes with warm wood highlights and matte finishes are hallmarks of this style.
Postmodern
One of the most visually intriguing and experimental mid-century design styles, postmodern design embraces boldness: saturated colors, punchy patterns, and sculptural forms. A departure from the strict focus on function inherent to many other mid-1900s design styles, postmodern furniture plays with mixed materials and unconventional shapes. Postmodern design is often favored by a young audience for its bold scale and focus on sustainability.
Pastoral Modern
Meticulous craftsmanship contributes to the accessible, tactile nature that characterizes Pastoral Modern design. Pastoral Modern spaces evoke the calmness of the country, filled with warm wood accents, natural fiber textiles, and exposed architectural details, such as slats and beams.
Bauhaus Industrial
Created around the modernist belief that form follows function, Bauhaus Industrial design marries art and industrial functionality. Bauhaus furniture is streamlined and geometric, often crafted of natural and manufactured materials. However, it isn’t devoid of life – it incorporates thoughtful dashes of saturated color. Notable Bauhaus furniture designers include Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Read our History of the Bauhaus to learn more about the school and design movement that inspired this style.
Italian Contemporary
Italian Contemporary design represents a refined approach to modern design. Similar to the Bauhaus Industrial style but slightly more indulgent, Italian Contemporary design puts a modernist spin on classic opulence. The Italian Contemporary color palette is cool, featuring chrome-plated metal, black leather, glass, acrylic, and stone.