Florence Knoll designed this credenza in 1961 and it's still in production today. The old version has leather tab door pulls, but the new ones have stainless steel pulls. I want either version, but only in the maple wood and preferable with a slate or maple top, although they don't seem to make them with wood tops any more.
Florence was an architect who had studied under Mies van der Rohe and worked for Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius.
According to her biography on Design Within Reach's website, "In 1943, she was taken on as an interior designer for Hans Knoll [who ran the Knoll Furniture Company] and re-directed the company’s product line from the Scandinavian style to International style. She also married Hans Knoll and as a partner in Knoll Associates, Inc., Knoll Textiles, Inc. and Knoll International, continued to run the business after her husband’s death.
Florence Knoll’s own designs are reserved, cool and angular, reflecting her modernist sensibility and perhaps the influence of childhood friend Eero Saarinen. While she is modest about her own accomplishments, it was through Florence that Knoll began to manufacture modern sculptural furniture.… In 1948, Knoll also acquired the rights to produce Mies van der Rohe’s furniture designs," including his Barcelona chair, one of my very favorite pieces of furniture.
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