(1923 - 2003)
Milo Baughman was a furniture designer for several companies throughout his career, including Pacific Iron, Drexel and Thayer Coggin Inc. Baughman is credited with helping to define American mid-century modern style, characterised by sleek, clean chrome lines combined with plush but contrasting upholstery.
It’s for his 50-year collaboration with Thayer Coggin Inc. that Baughman is best-known. This partnership lasted from 1953 to his death in 2003 and its golden period in the 1960s and 1970s produced items including the 951-103 chair from 1962 and the 955-304 sofa.
Baughman was also a firm believer in the virtues of good design and its effects on people’s lives. He lectured on design at several universities, including Rhode Island School of Design, the University of Tennessee and North Carolina State. In 1969, Brigham Young University asked him to establish its Department of Environmental Design and he stayed as chairman there for six years.
After moving from Kansas to California with his family as an infant, Baughman showed an aptitude for design and at age 13 he designed the interior and exterior of the family home.
He spent four years in the Army Air Forces during World War II and returned home to study product and architectural design at the Art Center School in Los Angeles. This was followed by a period at the Chouinard Art Institute (now the California Institute of the Arts).
Upon graduation, Baughman started work as an interior and custom furniture designer for the Frank Brothers furniture shop and left in 1947 to establish his own company - Milo Baughman Design Inc. He soon started to get commissions, including some from Glenn of California and Pacific Iron.
Baughman’s “California Modern” collection for Glenn of California made much use of aluminium, birch and walnut, a combination of wood and metal which would become an easily-recognisable signature.
Most of Baughman’s designs are unpretentious and functional, yet luxurious and always mindful of the people - and the bodies - who have to use them throughout their lives.
Following on from his success at Glenn of California, Baughman produced three collections for Drexel and then went on to create the Milo Baughman Collection for Murray Furniture in 1953. This was all while he was running his own design shop in Los Angeles with his wife, Olga Lee, who created fabrics, wallpaper and other accessories to accompany Baughman’s designs.
Towards the end of his career, in 1987,
Baughman was inducted into the Furniture Hall of Fame (1). His designs have featured in famous exhibitions such as High Styles: Twentieth Century American Design (Whitney Museum of Art in New York, 1985) and California Design: Living in a Modern Way (LACMA, 2012).