I’ve never had an “eye for design.” It wasn’t until my mid-twenties that I first truly noticed a piece of furniture: Walking into a friend’s apartment, I observed a skeleton of what might have been a love seat. There were no cushions; cross-hatched wood slats were laid bare, and the grain, illuminated by the sunlight, was dulled from use but still striking.

It was not large, but simple, streamlined. I asked if it was meant to be a couch. It will be soon, my friend told me, as she had recently purchased some memory foam and had planned to upholster it for the seating. A proud Swedish descendent, she described her affinity for Northern European design, noting that this particular piece, she believed, was Danish, likely built in the 1960s. I had never seen a naked sofa before. Where did she get it?

“From the trash,” she told me. She’d raked this particular piece from a heap of things in front of someone’s home. She loved how sophisticated the object made her feel—it would become a “grown-up couch,” a departure from her youth’s punk-house days, even though it was free. The cushions had been ruined by the rain, but she saw so much possibility in the wooden frame and her ability to make it her own. This was how I was introduced to Midcentury Modern (MCM) furniture: as a timeless and resilient receptacle, an empty vessel open to one’s own reimagining.

Since then I, a design journalist, have seen myriad MCM furnishings as high-end centerpieces: Tours of art collectors’ houses had displays of Eames lounge chairs; waiting to interview an architect in their home, I sat on a Miesian Barcelona chair. At dinner parties, friends show off their Marcel Breuer Wassily chairs, in shining chrome and brown leather. These objects, their owners often say, are of “high quality.”

There is something profound about the persistence of this kind of furniture: As it emerged and re-emerged, through originals and reproductions and knock-offs, the aspect of quality in MCM mythology has remained intact. It’s not only related to good taste and design excellence: The quality of Midcentury style is as much about furniture as it is about how the furniture impacts our lives.

The popularity of MCM furniture has been resurging since the 1990s. Following a short lull in the 1970s and 1980s, enormous interest prompted the opening of Design Within Reach, in 1998, and made designers like Charles and Ray Eames household names.

Many designers know the history: MCM furniture, like its parental architecture style, was developed out of post–World War II values of functionality and mass-producibility, carrying with it the utilitarian ethos derived from the likes of Le Corbusier’s “machine for living.” Utopian visions for accessibility and equality translated into forms for inhabiting, free from ornamentation that spoke to class or caste—tenets that extended from the building and into the interior furnishings.

Architect Edgar Kaufmann Jr., published 12 “rules” for the era’s furniture in his 1950 book, What Is Modern Design?, including that these objects should “express the qualities and beauties of the materials used, never making the materials seem to be what they are not.” Molded plywood, aluminum, plastic, and fiberglass characterized MCM furnishings designed in the United States, while Northern European furniture emphasized natural materials including teak, beechwood, birch, and leather.

While such materials made manufactured reproduction fast and simple, says Jared Peterson, an MCM collector and owner of the Chicago showroom Circa Modern, the furniture wasn’t inexpensive. When I visited his shop, we wiggled through a maze of space-age floor lamps and oaky wood or white plastic dining sets to a Herman Miller wall system and pair of fiberglass chairs, which were manufactured between the 1950s and 1960s.

“These pieces probably have a nostalgia to them: There is a feeling that things were built better back in the day,” Peterson says—and when it comes to objects like these, they often were. Expressing material purity meant creating pieces with little embellishment and a streamlined look, but it also required attention to how it was built. Several dealers I spoke to talked about evaluating wood pieces to see how components were joined (nails, screws, or glue seemed frowned upon; tongue-and-groove joints were preferred; plastics, which hold up well over time, are surprisingly prized).

But is quality of materials and construction—the kind of thing that’s felt when you pull open a drawer, sink into a sofa, clasp your hands around a mug—all MCM is about? “There are parts of art movements that bleed into MCM—Bauhaus, for example,” Marvin Benjamin, owner of the Chicago-area shop Benjamin Vintage and Design, told me. “But MCM was not born out of a collective that said, ‘We are going to shape furniture to be this thing.’”

That doesn’t mean that the style wasn’t without politics. “Bauhaus people were [generally] considered anti-fascist. The Nazis hated them. They were considered degenerate art,” he says, surmising that today, he’s not so sure that those politics remain among the connotations the term midcentury implies.“There’s so much thought and care put into the design and manufacture of [past] pieces, but then it gets washed away, because it’s diluted in this broad movement,” Benjamin says. There’s more to it than meets the eye. And maybe that’s part of the draw, consciously or not.

Another pull: Today, an original Eames lounge chair is listed on 1stDibs at $23,000. Quality, says Peterson, the Circa Modern dealer, also translates into resale value. “If you buy a sofa from me for $3,000, it should go up in value. You're not losing money.” In that sense, the attraction may not only be for construction quality, but for a time when one’s investments rendered a reliable return. The 1950s through the 80s was a time when employers provided pensions to their employees, guaranteeing an income into retirement; after that corporations adopted a new financial orthodoxy to maximize shareholder profit—yielding the layoff culture (and 401ks) we know now. No longer did one’s labor count toward future security; years of sweat and devotion spent at the office or on the factory floor translated, ultimately, to disposability.

Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the turn against investment in workers coincided with a renewed interest in aesthetic styles that spoke of moral egalitarianism—design that guaranteed a return on investment. Like Benjamin’s nostalgia for anti-authoritarian politics, our love of craftsmanship could also be a wistfulness for a time when quality work yielded quality returns.

This isn’t to say that “new” versions of the MCM style (even the IKEA knockoffs) don’t necessarily conjure those same sentiments. For his part, Benjamin doesn’t disparage buyers or manufacturers for “cheapening” the aesthetic—instead, making the style more accessible means that users can assign their own meanings to them. Understanding a design aesthetic’s origin and influence isn’t required for falling in love with an object, but legitimately well-made pieces impart an entirely different kind of allure.

Unsurprisingly, good design was the main draw for many of the MCM collectors—sourced from Bluesky and personal connections—I spoke with. One collector, Dorri, filled her dining area with Eames DCW and LCW chairs and gushed about how her guests would comment on how comfortable they were at dinner. Another, Sara, who inherited an Eames lounger from a friend, spoke about how every pregnant person should have one—its shape supported her changing body and relieved her sciatica.

Another collector, Madeline, owns only one piece: a $200 MCM nightstand that she purchased when moving out of her parents’ house after the pandemic lockdowns. Her social media algorithm had been feeding her some higher-end interiors, and she was drawn to the sleek look of MCM tables and desks. The nightstand is her most expensive piece of furniture, and in her small apartment it is the only piece with drawers (it currently holds her underwear). Beyond its utility and her love for how it looks and feels in her home, the nightstand has also come to symbolize, for her, a moment of “having [her] life in order”—a departure from the chaos of coming to adulthood during Covid’s social and economic unrest.

Peterson notes that, similarly, many of his buyers are younger folks who recently made a big life change: They’ve moved to a new city, got a new job, or bought their first home—they’re in the midst of reinvention.

In some ways that’s how I like to imagine the appeal of MCM furniture: not as ornamentation for wealth or a symbol for European egalitarian values. The attraction people feel toward it is for something that validates their messy, malleable selves.

Like my friend’s naked sofa or Madeline’s pricey nightstand, MCM furniture’s solid, intentional, timeless design can be of service to us at any stage in life. Whether sourced from a chic vintage store, a showroom, or a suburban heap, these well-made objects can hold every version of ourselves that we project upon it. Today, quality as it relates to MCM furniture extends beyond its mythology defined by honest materials and labor, and into supporting our honest visions of who we are, and who we want to become.