Forties Fever Heats Up Design

Brooklyn designers are feeling the 1940s in rooms and objects with curves, facets, fringe and velvet. Sculptural shapes invoke Jean Arp and Henry Moore.

Madcap black-and-white pops, jitterbugs and caffeinates. Natural materials such as wood and terrazzo ground and solidify. Jewel-tone colors like emerald and pink tourmaline soothe.

Brooklyn-based design company Trueing fashions a mirror using one of most popular and iconic materials of the 1940s: terrazzo.

Dotty Hex cement tile by Brooklyn’s Grow House Grow draws inspiration from what people wore in 1940s Cuba.

Ascher Davis Architects and Mahwish Syed Designs pull together a 1940s-inflected boudoir in the 2019 Brooklyn Heights Designer Showhouse with a curvy chair, fringed stool and velvet curtains.

Faceted forms dominated architecture and furniture design of the World War II years. Brooklyn’s Rich Brilliant Willing‘s Faceted Brim sconce in green alludes to that shapely history.

Crafted out of wood, the Arch coffee table by Brett Miller of Leeds, N.Y.-based Jack Rabbit Studio recalls midcentury sculptural forms. It’s available at Clinton Hill home store and coffee shop Relationships.

Editor’s note: A version of this story appeared in the Fall/Holiday 2019/20 issue of Brownstoner magazine.

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