Good design doesn’t have to cost a fortune: Lessons from the Moma’s low-cost furniture competition

On an October evening in 1947, New York’s cultural elite gathered for a soirée in the Rainbow Room of the Rockefeller Center to inaugurate a project that was intended to kick-start the country’s design industry. The venture was a collaboration between the Museum of Modern Art (Moma) and three of the country’s leading furniture manufacturers: Johnson Carper, Knoll and Herman Miller. Among the attendees were Nelson A Rockefeller, as well as the assistant secretary-general of the UN at the time, Henri Laugier. Why were they clinking glasses? Not for a vernissage, nor a fundraising gala. Instead, it was for the International Competition for Low-Cost Furniture Design.

In a speech to patrons at the dinner, Moma’s then-director, René d’Harnoncourt, noted that though the construction of affordable housing had become a political priority, scant attention had been paid at that point to “good inexpensive furniture”. The modern, postwar home needed new types of furnishings that were of high quality but “moderate in price”; “comfortable but not bulky”; and “easily moved, stored and cared for”. The competition invited designers from across the world to submit their ideas in two categories: seating units and storage units. Winning entrants would receive sizable cash prizes, as well as the glory of being featured in a Moma exhibition and the lucrative opportunity for their designs to be put into mass production.

It’s difficult to imagine Moma, or any other such institution, setting up a similar competition in the 21st century. Leaving aside the far less altruistic interests of contemporary tycoons, the general sentiment in the design industry is that we are already awash with far too much cheap furniture.

American furniture e-tailer Wayfair, which sells sofas for less than €220 (and with free delivery), reported annual revenue of €10bn in 2024. The most recently reported figures show that Amazon’s US sales in the sector grew by 16 per cent to an estimated €15.7bn. These juggernauts peddle “fast furniture” – easily shipped constructions that are engineered to last only a few years. When moving house, it’s often cheaper to throw out then replace a sofa or bookcase than hire a van to transport them.

Meanwhile, legacy brands that resisted moving production overseas have no chance to compete on price or delivery times, so have shifted focus from the many to the few, offering exquisitely made pieces to discerning, deep-pocketed consumers. Museums, galleries and upscale retailers now feel a duty to provide protected islands of high-quality design in the surrounding oceans of junk.

The throwaway culture enabled by ultra-affordable design presents a gigantic sustainability problem – millions of tonnes of furniture become landfill every year. In a recent survey of 2,000 British adults by heritage pottery brand Denby, nearly a third admitted to putting usable homeware in the bin. Add to that depressing statistic the sad uniformity and aesthetic compromises that come from living with chipboard bookcases, faux-marble counter-tops or pleather couches.

Most “quality” manufacturers refuse to compete with makers of fast furniture when it comes to price. But that does not mean that they should abandon all attempts at affordable design. After all, many of the best designs through time – and, indeed, the modern movement in general – were driven by a desire to make useful things budget-friendly.

Moma’s exhibition of low-cost furniture accepted submissions from January to October 1948 and drew more than 3,000 entries from 31 countries. Among them was a chair that’s familiar to many today. Charles and Ray Eames had experimented with a material that they had discovered at a war-surplus shop: a fibreglass-laced plastic invented by the US army for use in aircraft antennas shrouds. Together with a Los Angeles-based company, the designers developed a method for pressing the lightweight material into seats with organic forms. The prototype sent to Moma was deemed by the organisers to be “a most desirable addition to the gamut of materials available for modern rooms” and awarded second prize in the seating category. The Molded Fiberglass Chair was put into production by Herman Miller; it’s a top seller to this day.

The Eames motto was, “Getting the most of the best to the greatest number of people for the least.” The Molded Fiberglass Chair is an example of how they harnessed industrial materials and methods to achieve that goal. The manufacturing process required a bespoke hydraulic press but over time the production cost per chair was low. And thanks to the seat’s studied ergonomics, it was comfortable enough to be produced without any padding or upholstery.

The chair is also a case in point that it’s generally more difficult for designers to make a cheap, well-made item than an expensive one. While a chair built from cherry wood is almost guaranteed to look nice, creating something charming out of plastic demands more skill and imagination, as well as a knowledge of materials and the capabilities of industrial production methods: thinking about the joints to find the simplest solution; an awareness of local resources and expertise; and prototyping. It requires a curiosity of the new, such as the impulse to walk into an army-surplus shop.

The Moma exhibition that was based on the competition, Prize Designs for Modern Furniture, featured many other gems. There was a chair by Cuban-Mexican and Mexican designers Clara Porset and Xavier Guerrero that used the most rudimentary materials – a thin steel frame wrapped with rope or plastic cord – to make an elegant indoor or outdoor seat. Danish designer Hans J Wegner submitted a design for an armchair made from bent plywood. It might not have won but it did become the basis for the evergreen Shell chair. Ditto a modular bookcase by Franco Albini that had adjustable feet. Ten years later, it had been evolved into the Infinito – a stalwart of the Cassina catalogue.

In 1948, the same year that these designers sent their ideas to Moma, a young entrepreneur in Sweden named Ingvar Kamprad started selling furniture. Ikea was founded with the same guiding principle of affordability. By adopting flat-packed, self-assembly furniture, the company redefined accessibly priced home furnishings. Kamprad also encouraged his designers to experiment. In the 1970s, he gave his factory a few kilometres of jeans fabric with which to innovate. The result was Tajt, a low, denim-upholstered lounge chair that is now a coveted vintage Ikea piece. Many famed designers have since devised products for the company, including Verner Panton’s Vilbert chair from 1993, which was assembled from four MDF boards painted in the designer’s brazen colours.

That’s in stark contrast to the trajectory of the designs from Moma’s competition that have remained in production. The Molded Fiberglass Chair retails in Europe for about €1,000. The CH07 Shell chair, produced by Carl Hansen & Søn, costs about €4,000. Albini’s Infinito bookcase will set consumers back more than €9,000 for the smallest configuration of five stacked shelves. There are many reasons for this price inflation, including the cost of raw materials, disruption in supply chains and high manufacturing costs in Europe and the US. But there’s also the notion, perhaps born from a need to differentiate from the mass-market players, that “real” design is inherently expensive. The result is that consumers now have relatively few options in between a Wayfair bookcase and Vitsoe shelves. The former can be delivered to your door within days; the latter requires a quote from a dealer. The middle ground that most mid-century classics were originally made to serve has all but disappeared.

Mette and Rolf Hay saw this gap in the market in 2002, when the couple worked for Gubi, the Copenhagen design house that also carried Meda-based Cappellini in Denmark. They noticed that many of the people who coveted the Italian furniture brand’s pieces couldn’t afford them; those who could often found them too strange. With their brand, Hay, the couple set out to work with the best designers to make accessibly priced furniture and have since proven that this is not an impossible proposition. Hay’s collection includes work by leading contemporary designers Stefan Diez, Naoto Fukasawa and Muller van Severen, alongside colourful plastic crates and cutting boards that put a joyful spin on industrial products, without charging intimidating prices.

Larger companies have caught on too. Italian company Flos asked designer Philippe Malouin to come up with a new product that would specifically be affordable. He rose to the occasion with Bilboquet, a small table lamp that moves on a round magnet. With a price of €295, this top-selling piece has made Flos relevant to a younger generation. In a similar vein, last year Knoll launched a wooden dining chair by US designer Jonathan Muecke that retails for about €775. Meanwhile, a number of fast-furniture brands have started aiming a little higher in terms of design credentials and cost. Zara Home has launched a furniture collection with Belgian designer Vincent van Duysen that features supple ecru leather sofas and marble side tables. Ikea has begun reissuing pieces from its archive and is commissioning work by a new wave of design talent, including Andu Masebo and Emanuele Stamuli.

This middle ground is arguably where design really belongs. Too cheap and homes will look like university dorms; too expensive and the furniture loses its functional purpose (nobody enjoys placing a full cup onto a five-figure coffee table). The power of design lies in its tactile role in people’s everyday lives. It’s simple economics that cost is a key factor in the number of people that a piece of furniture will reach. Designers might profess disdain for fast-furniture retailers but many will secretly wish to work with them – economies of scale can also be put to work to spread good ideas and good taste.

A case in point is the globalisation of the café chair. From Athens to Nairobi and Cairo to Jakarta, a city’s casual bars, cafés and kiosks almost all spill onto the pavement using one of three chair models: the bistro, the monobloc or the aluminium chair. The bistro is a neat, foldable French design with slender iron legs and wooden slats for a seat and backrest. The monobloc, which is made of injection-moulded white plastic, is believed to be the world’s most popular perch. The aluminium bar chair is available with or without armrests and comes with a shiny table. All can be bought from big-box retailers the world over and are so ubiquitous that their specific designers have been largely lost to history. But they are also fairly comfortable, can withstand heavy use and are astonishingly affordable. In short, they meet the criteria that Moma laid out in 1947.

In the 1970s, Dieter Rams put those criteria in a slightly different way in his “Ten Principles for Good Design”. The celebrated German design director for Braun (who created those Vitsoe shelves) dictates that good design should be innovative, useful, aesthetic, understandable, unobtrusive, honest, long-lasting, thought through, environmentally friendly and involve “as little design as possible”. Nowhere in this manifesto does Rams mention price. Some things have reasons to be expensive and many do not. The mistake is to assume that a high price tag is what determines quality.

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