It was created to be mass-produced in order to be affordable to the average homeowner, an ideal Nelson inherited from the Bauhaus sensibility – good design for all. George Nelson’s 1946 Platform Bench is often cited as one of the first memorable designs of the genre. It was rooted in notions of functionality, elegance and simplicity as championed by the likes of the Bauhaus and Le Corbusier, whose dictum – “a house is a machine for living” – filtered naturally, and often controversially, into the ideology of mid-century designers. Peaking as its name suggests as a style from the 1940s-1960s, the mid-century movement was the organic offspring of modernism. Before you head down to the Oval at Kennington’s Cricket Ground this weekend to fill your homes, here’s a guide to mid-century furniture, a movement that continues to define and grace our kitchens and living rooms. Now the darling of Etsy, upscale vintage stores and the mid-century modern furniture fair at the Oval (which is taking place in London this Sunday, May 15), the historic movement continues to permeate our sense of what’s contemporary. With its bubble shapes, neat proportions and alluring sugar-coated colours, the mid-century has been aptly described as ‘furniture candy’. When spoken aloud, the words mid-century modern also have a melodic quality to them the mirrored, doubling ‘Ms’ roll smoothly off the tongue, evoking the clean sculptural lines of the perfectly balanced aesthetic that it describes. The label is to-the-point and no-nonsense, much like the straightforward interior style, which championed notions of functionality, ease and modern simplicity.

Writer and art historian Cara Greenberg coined the phrase ‘ Mid-Century Modern’ in 1984 – it was the title of her seminal book about what has since become a global and iconic design movement.

Space age furniture designers