Born in Los Angeles in 1904, Japanese-American designer and artist Isamu Noguchi made a name for himself as one of the preeminent sculptors and furniture designs of the mid-twentieth century. Noguchi spent much of his youth in Japan, where he was trained as a cabinetmaker, before returning to the United States and attending Columbia University. Though originally enrolled to study medicine, he shifted his focus to sculpting when he realized that it was his true passion. Noguchi applied his artistry to furniture, lighting, and product design, creating pieces--such as the IN-50 Coffee Table, Prismatic Table, and BB3 Lamp--for companies including Herman Miller, Knoll, Vitra, Ozeki, and Akari. His work also includes sculpture gardens around the world, notably at the Bienecke Rare Book Library at Yale University and at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris. Noguchi's home garden in Long Island City, New York, was opened to the public as the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum in 1985, three years before his death.

Herman Miller is named after a West Michigan businessman who helped his son-in-law buy the furniture company he worked at in 1923. By the middle of the 20th century, the name Herman Miller had become synonymous with “modern” furniture. Working with legendary designers George Nelson and Charles and Ray Eames, the company produced pieces that would become classics of industrial design. Herman Miller has continued this tradition of working with top designers, including Alexander Girard, Isamu Noguchi, Robert Propst, Bill Stumpf, Don Chadwick, Ayse Birsel, Yves Béhar, and many talented others.

Florence Knoll Bassett (born in Michigan in 1917 as Florence Schust) is an accomplished furniture designer and trained architect but is best known for bringing modernism to America through the designers she has promoted at Knoll, the company she formed in 1946 the year she married her late husband, Hans Knoll. Nicknamed “Shu”, Knoll studied architecture at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, where she met Eero Saarinen, and later at the architectural Association in London and the Armour Institute at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. She worked under the tutelage of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in the Windy City before getting guidance from Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer in Boston. In New York, she worked with Wallace K. Harrison, where she met Hans in 1941. The two hit it off and founded Knoll Associates, where Knoll worked with many of the modern masters—Saarinen, Mies, Harry Bertoia, Isamu Noguchi, Anni Albers—to put their designs back into production (like Saarinen’s Womb chair and Mies’s Barcelona chair and Dessau table) and help them develop new ones (like Bertoia’s wire furniture). Knoll also revolutionized interior design, with her “total design” approach that focused on embracing everything from the architecture to furniture to graphics to fabrics of a space, and worked on projects with firms like Skidmore Owings and Merrill. In 2002, she was awarded the National Endowment for the Arts’ National Medal of Arts for her contributions to architecture and design.

We design & build modern furniture you will love now—and proudly hand down later. Part Mid-Century Modern, part Minimalist, all our own. | www.hosslewoodworks.com | Crisp, clean lines and smooth finishes are the warm heart of every handcrafted piece. Our signature exposed plywood edges, eye-popping joints, and unique wood tones energize classic materials and add some serious soul. We keep things simple by stripping down every design to the most essential elements - every detail in our pieces is carefully selected, and all the unnecessary embellishments are left out. We keep things clean by always working with, not against, geometry. The finishes we use leave the wood with a natural, matte feeling. Our furniture is timeless yet distinctively modern at the same time. We draw inspiration from mid-century design icons - Charles and Raye Eames, Isamu Noguchi, Paul McCobb, George Nelson, Hans and Florence Knoll, Frank Lloyd Wright, to name a few. But while our pieces certainly have mid-century elements, they’re not so easily categorized. We think our tagline says it all — Simple, Clean, Modern.