L ow, armless seats used for donning one’s shoes, slipper chairs emerged in the boudoirs of 18th-century Europe. And there they remained for hundreds of years, until the great American decorator Billy Baldwin dared to bring his short-legged, high-backed version out into the living room for all to behold.
In the 1930s, while Baldwin was working for Manhattan decorator Ruby Ross Wood, the firm frequently used a large, armless chair that had been whittled down from the popular Lawson sofa, a square-backed, super-stuffed model developed at the turn of the 20th century for the home of Thomas W. Lawson, a noted Boston financier.
Those originals appeared in many a Ruby Ross Wood Inc. project, but after Wood’s death in 1950, Baldwin reduced them to create a perch that had “the comfort of…
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Architectural Digest (Digital) - 1 Issue, April 2021