While many great American furniture brands have come and gone, Bernhardt continues to thrive in its space. Spanning more than 130 years and four generations of family leadership, the company maintains an enduring presence in the modern era. It is a global manufacturer of furniture and home accessories and has garnered widespread acclaim for its signature high-quality craftsmanship. Today Bernhardt lounge chairs, coffee tables and dressers are reliable mainstays in living rooms, bedrooms, offices, school campuses and hospitality properties all over the world.

The company was founded in 1889 by John Bernhardt, a veteran of the sawmill trade who intended to produce durable furniture made of wood from the white oak trees that grew in his native North Carolina. Bernhardt quickly earned a reputation for his exceptionally strong, sturdy, striking pieces and eventually gained competitors in the likes of Broyhill and Kent-Coffey, two Lenoir companies that were established in the early 1900s. Bernhardt created fruitful relationships for distributing his furniture all over the country, and as the business gained steam, the company was able to survive the trials and tribulations of World War I and the Great Depression.

While World War II yielded labor and material shortages, demand for furniture took shape in the postwar years as new homeowners looked to furnish their spaces. Expansion followed for Bernhardt, and in 1958, the company added upholstered furniture to its growing catalog. As often as you can find boxy club chairs in Bernhardt’s inventory that are inspired by iconic designs by Le Corbusier or Milo Baughman, the brand has introduced reproductions of furnishings in period styles such as Chippendale, Hollywood Regency and chinoiserie.

Bernhardt continued to expand over time and, in 1981, added the Bernhardt Design division, which focuses on furnishing offices and public spaces. It entered the new millennium by announcing a licensed furniture partnership with Martha Stewart in 2001. Bernhardt and Stewart have since collaborated on several additional collections. In 2008 and 2009, the company launched two more divisions: Bernhardt Interiors for customizable and high-design furniture and Bernhardt Hospitality to cater to the needs of the hospitality market.

Bernhardt has garnered many prestigious awards over its long history, including multiple Pinnacle Design Achievement Awards from the American Society of Furniture Designers. The company is also a leader in sustainable manufacturing and works with the Sustainable Forestry Initiative and the Forest Stewardship Council.

In 2019, Bernhardt introduced the Bernhardt Exteriors division for high-quality and innovative outdoor furniture. Today, the company operates eight manufacturing facilities and continues to be a leader and trendsetter in the growing worldwide oak furniture market.

On 1stDibs, find Bernhardt seating, tables, case pieces and more.

A Close Look at Post-modern Furniture

Postmodern design was a short-lived movement that manifested itself chiefly in Italy and the United States in the early 1980s. The characteristics of vintage postmodern furniture and other postmodern objects and decor for the home included loud-patterned, usually plastic surfaces; strange proportions, vibrant colors and weird angles; and a vague-at-best relationship between form and function.

ORIGINS OF POSTMODERN FURNITURE DESIGN

Emerges during the 1960s; popularity explodes during the ’80s
A reaction to prevailing conventions of modernism by mainly American architects
Architect Robert Venturi critiques modern architecture in his Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966)
Theorist Charles Jencks, who championed architecture filled with allusions and cultural references, writes The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (1977)
Italian design collective the Memphis Group, also known as Memphis Milano, meets for the first time (1980)
Memphis collective debuts more than 50 objects and furnishings at Salone del Milano (1981)
Interest in style declines, minimalism gains steam

CHARACTERISTICS OF POSTMODERN FURNITURE DESIGN

Dizzying graphic patterns and an emphasis on loud, off-the-wall colors
Use of plastic and laminates, glass, metal and marble; lacquered and painted wood
Unconventional proportions and abundant ornamentation
Playful nods to Art Deco and Pop art

POSTMODERN FURNITURE DESIGNERS TO KNOW

VINTAGE POSTMODERN FURNITURE ON 1STDIBS

Critics derided postmodern design as a grandstanding bid for attention and nothing of consequence. Decades later, the fact that postmodernism still has the power to provoke thoughts, along with other reactions, proves they were not entirely correct.

Postmodern design began as an architectural critique. Starting in the 1960s, a small cadre of mainly American architects began to argue that modernism, once high-minded and even noble in its goals, had become stale, stagnant and blandly corporate. Later, in Milan, a cohort of creators led by Ettore Sottsass and Alessandro Mendini — a onetime mentor to Sottsass and a key figure in the Italian Radical movement — brought the discussion to bear on design.

Sottsass, an industrial designer, philosopher and provocateur, gathered a core group of young designers into a collective in 1980 they called Memphis. Members of the Memphis Group, which would come to include Martine Bedin, Michael Graves, Marco Zanini, Shiro Kuramata, Michele de Lucchi and Matteo Thun, saw design as a means of communication, and they wanted it to shout. That it did: The first Memphis collection appeared in 1981 in Milan and broke all the modernist taboos, embracing irony, kitsch, wild ornamentation and bad taste.

Memphis works remain icons of postmodernism: the Sottsass Casablanca bookcase, with its leopard-print plastic veneer; de Lucchi’s First chair, which has been described as having the look of an electronics component; Martine Bedin’s Super lamp: a pull-toy puppy on a power-cord leash. Even though it preceded the Memphis Group’s formal launch, Sottsass’s iconic Ultrafragola mirror — in its conspicuously curved plastic shell with radical pops of pink neon — proves striking in any space and embodies many of the collective’s postmodern ideals.

After the initial Memphis show caused an uproar, the postmodern movement within furniture and interior design quickly took off in America. (Memphis fell out of fashion when the Reagan era gave way to cool 1990’s minimalism.) The architect Robert Venturi had by then already begun a series of plywood chairs for Knoll Inc., with beefy, exaggerated silhouettes of traditional styles such as Queen Anne and Chippendale. In 1982, the new firm Swid Powell enlisted a group of top American architects, including Frank Gehry, Richard Meier, Stanley Tigerman and Venturi to create postmodern tableware in silver, ceramic and glass.

On 1stDibs, the vintage postmodern furniture collection includes chairs, coffee tables, sofas, decorative objects, table lamps and more.

Finding the Right Club-chairs for You

Traditionally covered in leather and abundantly luxurious, antique and vintage club chairs are among the most comfortable pieces of furniture that you could ever bring into your living room. The classic club chair is one of the 52 types of chairs to know when decorating your home.

While the club chair was especially popular in France during the 1920s — known there as fauteuil confortable (or “comfortable armchair”) — modern versions are derived from those used in 19th-century English gentlemen’s clubs, which is believed to be the origin of their name. A riff on the traditional armchair, these seats typically have low backs, extra-wide armrests and more than sufficient padding to support extended lounging.

Well-known modern interpretations of the club chair can be found in Marcel Breuer’s pared-down Wassily lounge chair and in the cube-like seats of the LC collection, designed by Charles-Édouard “Le Corbusier” Jeanneret, Pierre Jeanneret and Charlotte Perriand. Debuting in 1956, the celebrated Eames lounge chair was a fresh, subversive new take on the classic English club chair and a culmination of experimentation by Charles and Ray Eames, its inventive creators.

When shopping for any style of club chair, be it a mid-century modern club chair, an Art Deco club chair or another type, you’ll want to think about the room you have in mind for this distinct seating. Club chairs occupy a lot of real estate, as they’re usually larger than standard chairs. (You’ll want to make certain that there is at least one foot of space around the chair, for example, to ensure the sitter doesn’t feel cramped and that there is room to move freely around the furnishing.) And although they were originally upholstered in leather, contemporary iterations of the club chair can be found in fabric and plastic.

Introduce a decadent atmosphere and a whole lot of comfort in your living room or reading nook. Explore a collection of antique, new and vintage club chairs on 1stDibs.