1. Timeless design really can last a lifetime.
Above: Johnson’s living room furniture is by his friend Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. (The Glass House itself was directly inspired by a model of Mies’s Farnsworth house in Illinois.) After seeing Mies’s German Pavilion at the International Exposition in Barcelona of 1929, Johnson ordered the furniture for his own New York living room and then used it in the Glass House. Once in place, not a single piece, down to the coffee table’s round ashtray and square box, ever changed (since the sixties, though, the stool has sported a cigarette burn left by Andy Warhol).
Note the intimate placement of the seating for easy conversation and the lounge option (in this house, comfort is welcomed in, if not allowed to reign supreme: “You can feel comfortable in any environment as long as it’s beautiful,” said Johnson).
N.B.: The Barcelona Chair and Barcelona Stool are available from the Glass House Design Store, and proceeds help preserve and maintain the museum.