Rendering of a bedroom with furniture by the Widdicomb Furniture Company

Gilbert Rohde’s vanity table and ottoman, manufactured by Herman Miller from 1933 to 1937, express many of the contradictory principles that informed livable modernist bedroom designs of the 1930s (fig. 3.1). On the one hand, the set contributes to an atmosphere of respite and retreat that many decorators and magazine writers believed the bedroom should...