001: WHEN DID MODULAR FURNITURE STOP BEING FUN?

Let's bring back the element of delight

If you follow enough vintage furniture accounts on Instagram, you’re going to eventually notice a certain kind of post. A guy (and invariably, it’s a guy) walks into the frame and starts shifting or unfolding a piece of furniture until it’s transformed, either in shape or use.

On Galerie Balbach, there’s a dude widening the diameter of a rare, 1920s-era footed table, using a complicated mechanism that seems to involve a belt. On DeStudio, the dealer rolls out an elegant Postmodern container, whose triangle point splits and folds down to create a bar cabinet with a mirrored top (for cocaine?) and a sunken cavity (for liquor). On Mid-Century Friends, the guy swivels out three sections from a round, 1980s-era Skovby table, pushes down the triangular insert hidden inside the table’s central column, then proceeds to deftly pull out three interlocking drop leafs like they’re rabbits in a hat. (In truth, a lot of these videos come from Mid-Century Friends, which is a vintage dealer based in Germany, which makes sense when you realize that all of the best vintage comes from Europe, I’m sorry to report.)

Click the below to watch things unfold (pun very much intended).

I started saving these videos a few years ago knowing I’d want to write about them at some point, but also because they triggered a little frisson of joy when I went back and looked at them. When you watch a video like this, you feel something, which is what furniture is supposed to do under the best circumstances.

However, I also feel some amount of frustration for what we’ve lost when I look at these videos. Most of these pieces were made between the 1960s and the 1980s, a high point for expressiveness and ingenuity in furniture design. Many of them weren’t mass produced at the time, although you can still buy and customize versions of that Skovby table new, which I looked into doing when I moved into my Greenpoint apartment six years ago. But these pieces were often produced in small series. They weren’t one-offs. Then, at a certain point, nothing. Why — and when — did modular furniture stop being fun?

Big furniture brands, of course, continue to offer traditional extendable dining tables, often with a drop leaf or two. (This not a small space solution, IMHO. I don’t have the space for two enormous wooden rectangles in my closet. Do you?) But that’s not the kind of thing I’m talking about, and there’s nothing more creative than that happening; independent designers don’t seem to fuck much with the genre at all. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I saw a piece of contemporary modular furniture that was as delightful as any of those featured in this post. Most modular furniture these days involves the smushing together of two or more cushioned seats, or it’s a bookshelf where the selling point is … being able to add more shelves.

OK, if you’re gonna be a simple extendable dining table, at least be a CHIIIIC extendable dining table. Chelsea Dining Table by Vittorio Intrioni, Italy, 1960s, from Spazio Leone

Perhaps the best example I’ve ever seen of this kind of furniture is the Bariomat sideboard by Alfons Doerr, a German designer from the 1960s whose internet presence unfortunately exists almost exclusively in the service of this furniture piece. A futuristic rosewood credenza with laminate doors and a pedestal base, it becomes, with the turn of a key and a flip of the switch, a kind of party palace dry bar, its lighted, mirrored drinks cabinet ascending from a hidden compartment in the rear. (Doerr actually patented this piece in 1968, which is possibly why any information about it exists at all, and it was manufactured by Bariomat in a small series.)

I know this video links to Facebook, but you will not regret watching the dramatic transformation!!!!

THIS PIECE IS UNBELIEVABLY FUN. I often proselytize about the importance of having statement pieces in your home, but can you imagine what a next-level party trick this would be? This is Mad Men, Tomorrrowland shit. This is the kind of thing everyone should be able to have in their house. West Elm could easily make this. &Tradition could easily make this. And yet, this is the kind of thing that I personally have only seen in the movies; in fact, I’ve read that there’s a bar like this in the James Bond franchise, but I’ve only ever seen one Bond movie and life’s too short to do that kind of recon for this newsletter. But even in the year 2025, I can only imagine this cabinet would immediately transport you to that era, when technology made people feel hopeful rather than frightened of what’s coming.

And isn’t that what we need now? Having a piece of furniture that transforms in some unexpected way isn’t that far a leap from “little treat” culture — i.e. considering 21st-century society is an ongoing trash fire, don’t we deserve little moments of delight in our homes? Why aren’t contemporary furniture brands capitalizing on this? I know in my heart the practical answer to this question, which will become an almost annoyingly recurring drumbeat in this newsletter — that modular furniture is likely harder and more expensive to make, and ensuring its appeal at scale is a tricky gambit. But don’t we owe it to ourselves to try?

Because actually modular furniture isn’t just about being fun — it’s about responding to very real human needs and the way we live and adapt to our own domestic space.