Karl Springer

The New York designer, who first achieved success in the 1960s, redefined glamour by bringing together elemental shapes and luxurious materials.

- Tim McKeough

Karl Springer might never have become one of America’s top furniture designers if it hadn’t been for the Duchess of Windsor. He was working as a window dresser for Lord & Taylor in Manhattan in the 1960s when he took a bookbinding class and began covering small accessories—books, picture frames, and tiny tables—in exotic skins such as cobra and python. When the duchess, previously the American socialite Wallis Simpson (for whom a love struck King Edward VIII abdicated his throne in 1936), encountered one of Springer’s telephone tables, it was lust at first sight. She bought the diminutive two-tier stand and followed it up with a wide range of Springer’s other wares. “Suddenly, everyone in her social circle wanted that table,” says Evan Lobel, owner of New York’s Lobel Modern, who is at work on a book about the designer. “That really launched his career.”

The duchess wasn’t the only high-profile figure who fell for Springer’s unique glamour, which blended simple forms with spectacular materials, including sharkskin shagreen, goatskin, parchment, embossed leathers, Lucite, lacquered linen, horn, bone, and feathers. Springer offered a new, distinctly American twist on French Art Deco from the ’20s and ’30s, channelling inspiration from designers like Jean-Michel Frank and Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann at a time when many homeowners began desiring a little more outright opulence.

As both his business and the scale of his pieces grew in the ’70s and ’80s, Springer’s customers came to include Jackie and Aristotle Onassis (for whom he named one of his most iconic chairs), Frank Sinatra, Diana Ross, Joni Mitchell, Geoffrey Beene, and Björn Borg. “His pieces were status symbols,” says Lobel. “If you had Karl Springer in your home, you had made it.”