How Midcentury Trendy Thayer Coggin Stays Related After 70 years – WWD

HIGH POINT, N.C. — It will get loud inside Thayer Coggin’s headquarters right here. Past the workplaces and previous the showroom stuffed with midcentury fashionable designs, the manufacturing facility flooring buzzes with the shrill screech of saws slicing wooden, the tap-tap of hammer to nail, the whir of stitching machines stitching upholstery.

“We actually are nonetheless constructing this furnishings the identical means we did 70 years in the past,” stated Phil Miller, vice chairman of Thayer Coggin. “Loads of firms have modified their strategies of producing or the uncooked supplies that they used, however Thayer Coggin was adamant about saying, ‘We’re going to take care of the best way I used to be taught to construct furnishings, which is the suitable means.’”

In 1953, Coggin based his furnishings firm after serving as an Military medic in World Struggle II. Submit-war America was a time of creativity and consumerism, with returning G.I.s and their households settling into suburban enclaves popping up throughout the nation. With all these new houses, the demand for furnishings to fill them accelerated.

Coggin noticed that want and launched his firm in a small facility in Excessive Level with simply over a dozen workers. That very same yr, he started working with Milo Baughman, who turned one of many well-known names of midcentury fashionable furnishings design. Coggin and Baughman struck an expert and artistic partnership that will endure till their deaths in 2003.

Hailing from the West Coast, Baughman favored the California modernist method to design, with clear, smooth traces and supplies and motifs that mirror a connection between interiors and the out of doors world. In Coggin, Baughman discovered a kindred spirit who not solely understood fashionable design however shared his values of furnishings development.

“The way in which you construct a chunk of furnishings is a gathering of design, engineering and uncooked supplies,” Miller stated. “And people parts, together with the manufacturing methods used, are the distinction between constructing a chunk of furnishings that may final a lifetime or producing a product with built-in obsolescence.”

Thayer Coggin nonetheless carries on the identical bench-made craftsmanship manufacturing mannequin at the moment, a rarity within the furnishings trade, the place the commoditization of house items has diminished total high quality and left landfills brimming with “quick furnishings” castoffs.

“For example, all our lumber is maple as a result of it’s the perfect, most-dense wooden for a chair,” Miller stated. “We use wood dowels for the joinery, and every structural nook is strengthened with a wooden nook block reduce at a 45-degree angle. That’s a technique traditionally related to tremendous furnishings and solely a handful of firms nonetheless try this at the moment.”

Thayer Coggin custom-makes each bit of its furnishings, from the body to the end to the upholstery. High quality definitely components into that course of, as does the character of the traces and silhouettes of midcentury design.

“It’s harder to fabricate modern-design furnishings than conventional designs,” Miller stated. “The body creates the form, and the upholstery needs to be reduce and sewn exactly and fitted to the piece.”

The Ripple chair from Thayer Coggin.

A cursory look at furnishings resale websites resembling Chairish illustrate how Thayer Coggin’s midcentury fashionable designs have endured. Classic items designed by Baughman can fetch as a lot as $16,500 for a pair of tilt-and-swivel lounge chairs.

“In the event you would’ve purchased the Roxy-O chair in 1965, it might have value $250, which was definitely quite a bit in relative {dollars}, however they begin at $10,000 on the classic market now,” Miller stated.

The classic market isn’t the one place to seek out Baughman designs for Thayer Coggin. The corporate nonetheless produces the Roxy-O chair together with an array of Baughman’s signature items, such because the Good Egg swivel chair, the Ripple armless chaise and the round Bond acrylic lounge chair.

Thayer Coggin’s Roxy-O swivel chair.

These items can be found in an array of finishes and supplies from wooden to metallic, practically 400 materials and round 120 leather-based choices. Miller estimates the corporate additionally makes use of round 25 % buyer’s personal materials (COM) materials, normally working with inside designers, which make up a big portion of Thayer Coggin’s clientele.

However Thayer Coggin doesn’t merely depend on classic Baughman designs to gas its enterprise. Right this moment the corporate employs 4 designers — Ransom Culler, Stanley Jay Friedman, Rick Lee and Alexander Man Hill — who every deliver their very own tackle fashionable design to the items they create for the model. Hill serves because the model’s director of design, an apt position contemplating he studied underneath Baughman at Brigham Younger College and labored on his workers as an affiliate product designer.

“My designs mirror the place I really feel fashionable furnishings is at the moment in relation to fashion, proportion and luxury,” Hill stated.

Finally October’s Excessive Level Market, Thayer Coggin launched an array of items in celebration of its seventieth anniversary, together with the sculptural chrome steel Nest chair designed by Lee; Culler’s Take 2 lounger, which gives a brand new spin on the Womb chair, and Friedman’s tiered, round Palooka tables.

The corporate additionally reissued Baughman’s elegantly undulating Ripple chaise, which was initially launched in 1966. Sitting in Thayer Coggin’s showroom, upholstered in a buttery yellow nubby material, the piece feels as contemporary at the moment because it will need to have practically 60 years in the past.

That sense of timelessness — each in design and development — continues to serve Thayer Coggin underneath the watchful eye of Coggin’s daughter, Royale Wiggin, who runs the corporate. And the dedication to creating furnishings “the suitable means” continues to make Thayer Coggin stand out in a sea of midcentury fashionable copycats.

“As individuals have gotten into that section of furnishings, they’re attempting to hit sure value factors, which is comprehensible,” Miller stated. “However meaning you need to begin dumbing down the design, and you need to use decrease density cushions. We all know who we’re, and we respect the truth that Thayer Coggin is an funding, not only a buy.”