Peter Draenert On Sale

Light, sound and 180 million-year-old fossils are just some of the adventurous concepts furniture maker and designer Peter Draenert played with across his career. He creatively expanded the definition of a table beyond form and function, while including many different materials, ranging from marble and glass to granite, wood and travertine. 

In 1968, Draenert and his wife Karin started the Draenert Company in Friedrichshafen, Germany. During the 1970s, the company made tables from oil slate with help from the state and research teams in Holzmaden, Germany. Using other materials like steel and natural stone, Draenert emphasized the artistic qualities of his furniture while adding functional aspects like drawers and hidden compartments. 

Each of his dining tables included easy-to-use extensions, while his coffee tables featured a swivel plate or multiple levels for extra storage and display. In the 2000s, he experimented with light. Some of his tables doubled as alternative light sources, while others, like those made with German artist Walter Giers, used changing lights and patterns.

While best remembered for his tables, a range of furniture manufactured by his company has been collected by museums, including an armchair at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and a cabinet at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

On 1stDibs, find a collection of vintage Peter Draenert seating and tables.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw sweeping social change and major scientific advances — both of which contributed to a new aesthetic: modernism. Rejecting the rigidity of Victorian artistic conventions, modernists sought a new means of expression. References to the natural world and ornate classical embellishments gave way to the sleek simplicity of the Machine Age. Architect Philip Johnson characterized the hallmarks of modernism as “machine-like simplicity, smoothness or surface [and] avoidance of ornament.”

Early practitioners of modernist design include the De Stijl (“The Style”) group, founded in the Netherlands in 1917, and the Bauhaus School, founded two years later in Germany.

Followers of both groups produced sleek, spare designs — many of which became icons of daily life in the 20th century. The modernists rejected both natural and historical references and relied primarily on industrial materials such as metal, glass, plywood, and, later, plastics. While Bauhaus principals Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe created furniture from mass-produced, chrome-plated steel, American visionaries like Charles and Ray Eames worked in materials as novel as molded plywood and fiberglass. Today, Breuer’s Wassily chair, Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona chair — crafted with his romantic partner, designer Lilly Reich — and the Eames lounge chair are emblems of progressive design and vintage originals are prized cornerstones of collections.

It’s difficult to overstate the influence that modernism continues to wield over designers and architects — and equally difficult to overstate how revolutionary it was when it first appeared a century ago. But because modernist furniture designs are so simple, they can blend in seamlessly with just about any type of décor. Don’t overlook them.