SAM MALOOF (1916–2009)

Sam Maloof, designer and woodworker, has died, reports the Los Angeles Times’s Janet Eastman. Maloof’s furniture was initially prized for its simplicity and practicality by Southern Californian homeowners in the 1950s and later valued for its beauty and timelessness by collectors, museum curators, and even US presidents.

Maloof’s cabinets, cork-top coffee tables, and other modern pieces were instantly praised by home-magazine editors and trend-setting interior designers. His walnut chairs and bar stools were installed in several of the so-called Case Study Houses—the modernist, experimental homes in the Los Angeles area built between 1945 and 1966 by Richard Neutra, Charles Eames, Eero Saarinen, and other architects.

Even after Maloof was recognized as an influential pioneer of contemporary California decor, and even as his furniture was reselling for one hundred times its original price, Maloof referred to himself simply as a “woodworker.”

“He was trying to make other people appreciate what it was like to live with a handcrafted object in which there was a kind of union between maker, object, and owner,” said Jeremy Adamson, who wrote The Furniture of Sam Maloof, published in 2001 to coincide with a retrospective exhibition of Maloof’s work at the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Renwick Gallery in Washington, DC.