Pacific Iron Products / New York Times
Before the holidays I received an email from Tom Delavan, the design and interiors director of the New York Times T Magazine. One of his recurring columns is called Style Detective. Readers submit a design mystery and Tom solves it.
He was asking about a Pacific Iron chair. Specifically, he wanted to know where one could get the Milo Baughman chair seen in the photo above. He didn't give me too much background, send me the photo, or even mention exactly why he was asking—other than it was related to his column. After reading the article, I found out it was related to a 1952 Julius Shulman photo of the Robson & Helen Chambers Residence in Palm Springs. It was Robson's own house. The photo is after Chambers enclosed the dining patio. Chambers went to USC School of Architecture and was working in the Albert Frey and John Porter Clark office at the time, but this was a solo project.
Photo: New York Times
According to the article, Tom contacted Alexandra Cunningham Cameron, the curator of contemporary design at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in Manhattan. She reached out to some longtime dealers in New York to see if they could identify the chairs.
This part isn't in the article, but one of the dealers asked Gerard O'Brien from Reform and The Landing Gallery, who told them he thought it was Pacific Iron but they should reach out to me to verify. That didn't happen, but eventually it led to one of my blog posts on the Pacific Iron chairs and the ad below.
I sent Tom information about the chair, a fresh picture of one of mine (left) and they also used a photo from my blog that I took when I bought a set of four frames in 2018. These five are the only examples I have ever seen or heard of.
I still have them all in the dungeon.
As mentioned in the article, the chair is part of the Pacific Iron Products Palisades Group and it was designed by Milo Baughman.
In 1951, the chair was selected for MoMA Good Design. The exhibition was held Nov 27, 1951 through Jan 27, 1952. You can see the chair way back there next to the Sol Bloom catch all.
Source: MoMA
Right there
Also noted in the ads, the chair were selected for the 1951 House Beautiful Pace-Setter House. It was sort of like their versions of the Arts & Architecture Case Study House program. The magazine described it... "Each year House Beautiful builds a Pace-Setter house. Our intention is to inspire you, to give you ideas for your own life, to offer you a contemporary standard against which to measure your own home plans, dreams. and present realizations."
Photo: Maynard Parker
The multi-page article ran in May 1951.
The house architect was Julius Gregory and Thomas Church, did the landscape and site planning.
There are a number of Pacific Iron Products pieces beyond the Baughman chair in the back left. The rest are part of the Americana line by Paul Laszlo.
Here is another picture of the chairs at the Robson & Helen Chambers Residence.
Source: Julius Shulman © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10)
Robson & Helen Chambers Residence (Palm Springs, Calif.), 1952 by Robson Chambers
Source: Julius Shulman © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10)
Shulman did a shoot for Pacific Iron Products a couple years earlier that included the Palisades chair. You'll notice the stretcher bar design is different. The photos were used in a Living for Modern Homemakers article. The more decorative set in the background to the right ad left is also Pacific Iron.
Source: Julius Shulman © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10)
In the same photo shoot, there are side chairs and a table that match this early Palisades design. Since the job was for Pacific Iron, it's possible that they were prototypes. They aren't in catalogs or ads that I've seen.
Source: Julius Shulman © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10)