On a clear crisp morning, furniture designer Vladimir Kagan and needlework designer Erica Wilson share breakfast with me in their 14th-floor Park Avenue apartment. Wilson serves soft-boiled eggs with toast, jams, cheeses, meats, and taramosalata (a Greek caviar spread). Kagan and Wilson have been married since 1956, and have lived in this apartment for three decades. “Breakfast is my favorite time of day,” announces Kagan.

Kagan, best known for his chairs, divans, and sectional sofas, escaped Nazi Germany with his family in 1938, arriving in New York at age 11. His career took off in the ’50s and ’60s, when he developed his distinct style, mixing modern aesthetics with sculptural woodcraft. Kagan and Wilson’s apartment is an endless rabbit warren packed with furniture, artwork, and their home offices. In the living room sits a 1957 Kagan Contour rocking chair upholstered with a Wilson needlepoint of an owl on a tree branch. “We collaborate once in a while,” says Kagan, “but our professional lives always have a sort of quiet interaction.”

It was 1954, and I was on the entertainment committee at the Architectural League of New York. Erica was dating an architect, and he brought her to our annual costume party. She was dressed as a black poodle, and I was a circus roustabout, in a striped blazer and a straw boater hat. We sat next to each other at dinner, but I thought she was married to her date, and she thought the same of me. It turned out we were both unmarried, so I invited her for lunch at my office. The next day when she appeared, my secretary said, “There’s a Miss Wilson here.” I had completely forgotten. I looked out and saw a tall blonde, and we went to lunch. Two years later we married. Since then, our professions interwove. Her work is more traditional, but it has always fit with my style.

Craft has always been paramount for me, mostly because my father was a master cabinetmaker, and I learned from the wonderful carpenters who worked in his shop. Then I studied architecture, which filled in the missing ingredients—structural science and modern aesthetics. There’s an old German saying, “Honor the craftsman,” and I’ve held it dear. I wanted my work to have a 20th-century look, but 18th-century-quality craft. I never rejected the past.

Drawing is the most important tool I have: the ability to visualize with pen on paper what a finished product should look like. That was something my father instilled in me when I was very young. He said, “Learn to draw,” because he couldn’t do it very well. I started drawing pictures from life: trees, landscapes, human figures, and anatomy. At one point I had the vision I wanted to be an artist, but my father said, “You’ve got to do something practical. You can always paint on the weekend.” So drawing became my tool for becoming a designer.

After I finished Columbia architecture school in the ’40s, I was struggling to combine minimal trends of modernism with organic shapes from nature. My earliest furniture was very linear. Then I started to fall in love with sinuous contours. By the ’50s, my furniture became more sculpturally related to trees and animals. I’ve always had fun watching young fawns or young horses: the way they stand unsteadily, and in order to steady themselves they splay their legs outward. I thought that posture had an element of strength, which I adapted for my furniture. So a lot of my pieces are quite leggy. I like chair and table legs to look delicate but strong.

I’ve been designing a seating collection for my Italian manufacturer, Fendi Casa. I came up with new ideas for the Milan furniture fair. But I decided to go to High Point in North Carolina instead, where my sofas for American Leather are on display. We’ll go to Europe afterward, to Germany, where I have the most wonderful assignment—to judge a beauty contest at the Kagan Club. It’s a marvelous nightclub named after me, and the beauty contest is a promotional event. I didn’t do the interior,but they used a lot of my furniture. I figure the reason they named it after me was that in case it failed, no one would know who Kagan was, you see.