American Mid-Century Style: The Pieces, the Book, the Album, the Film

Between 1945 and 1965, California and Michigan made the furniture for the middle class settling into the new suburbs. Herman Miller and Knoll put Eames, Nelson, Noguchi and Saarinen into production: organic forms, moulded plywood and fibreglass inherited from the war, optimism without gilding. The style comes down to a single idea: industrial comfort can be beautiful.

The pieces

The Lounge Chair by Charles and Ray Eames (Herman Miller, 1956), plywood shells and leather: between €8,000 and €12,000 new at Vitra, between €3,000 and €8,000 vintage. Isamu Noguchi's coffee table (1947), a glass top on two identical wooden legs, around €2,500 new. George Nelson's Platform bench (1946), between €1,500 and €3,000 depending on length. We took the Lounge Chair and the Noguchi table apart in Le Scan, copies included.

The book

"Mid-Century Modern" by Cara Greenberg (1984). This is the book that gave the style its name, thirty years after the fact, by photographing what the flea markets were selling off cheap.

The album

"Kind of Blue" by Miles Davis (1959), recorded when the Lounge Chair was three years old. Modal, slow, without one ornament too many: it sounds like a Richard Neutra house at six in the evening. "Time Out" by Dave Brubeck, from the same year, is the lighter alternative.

The film

"A Single Man" by Tom Ford (2009): a John Lautner house, a George Falconer who lines up his pens with a designer's precision. Failing that, Alfred Hitchcock's "North by Northwest" (1959) for the Vandamm house, fake Frank Lloyd Wright built in the studio but a genuine manifesto.

The palette and the materials

Walnut and teak in the lead, cognac leather, olive, burnt orange, a little brass; smoked glass arrives later, in Italy. Low, indirect light, in table lamps. To get there without copying: one signed piece per room, solid wood around it, matt textiles.

The address

Palm Springs, in California, where February's Modernism Week opens up the villas of the 1950s. In Los Angeles, the Eames House in Pacific Palisades, to which we devoted a Maison ouverte.

Spotted an armchair or a bench in this spirit? Scan it on Beyit: the original, the edition, the era, the value — and what exists around it.