Join Our Email List

Latest Blog Entries

Site Last Updated: 04/11/2019
Print This Item

American Art Deco Furniture

Donald Deskey Vanity, Mirror & Stool

This American art deco three piece vanity set was designed ca. 1935 by Donald DeskeyDonald Deskey
American [1894 - 1989] 

Donald Deskey was born in Blue Earth, Minnesota in 1894. In 1912 he left for California with a high school diploma. After a series of jobs, a stint in the army, and attendance at The University of California at Berkeley to study architecture and painting he began in 1920 working in advertising, first Chicago then New York. In 1925 he visited the Exposition International des Arts Decoratifs et Industrials Moderns and the Bauhaus in Germany. He came back to New York in 1926 committed to the modern movement. He created store window displays for Saks- Fifth Avenue and made folding screens for Paul Frankl. Frankl paid Deskey $35 per screen and sold them for $400… a tidy profit. Through his work at Saks, Deskey met the company president, Adam Gimbel and showed him some furniture drawings he had made in Paris. Gimbel was impressed enough that he commissioned Deskey to furnish the interior of his Park Avenue apartment, Deskey’s first...
Click to Read More
(1894 – 1989) for the Widdicomb Furniture Company of Grand Rapids, Michigan. The vanity which is finished in black lacquer and Avoidire veneer is matched by the original stool and mirror. From the suite featured in Home Furnishing Arts Volume III, Fall/Winter 1935. The vanity measures 50” wide x 18” deep and 24 ½” high; the mirror is 27” wide and 44” high and the stool is 20” in diameter and 18 ½” high.

Request Information On This Piece

Reference# AF096

site : © Alaskan Star Interactive