The fabulous Mesa table - designed by T.H. Robsjohn-Gibbings as a 1950’s antidote to antiques fatigue - has become a design trophy du jour. The first image is the château of AD100 designer @pierre.yovanovitch, who says “The table embodies Robsjohn-Gibbings’s ability to create some of the most important, classically informed, yet gracious and livable modern furnishings of the era.” The London-born Robsjohn-Gibbings (last image) wrote “American houses have become the rubbish dumps of Europe,” in “Good-bye, Mr. Chippendale,” his comical 1944 rant about the unabating Stateside obsession with antiques. He urged the nearly postwar public toward something fresh - not the cold modernism sweeping Europe but a contemporary kind of Americana. In his collection in the 1940’s for the Widdicomb Furniture Company in Grand Rapids, MI, Robsjohn-Gibbings had a chance to bring his ideas into reality. Inspired by the Southwest, his sinuous forms captured a laid-back quality he prized: “The essential luxury of life in America is informality,” he once told The New York Times. The biomorphic Mesa table, inspired by the Arizona terrain, has become “one of those It pieces. Like a Royère Polar Bear sofa,” says Richard Wright, of @ragowrightauctions, who estimates he has sold about 10 in his career and says the Mesa is much in demand thanks to “a wealthy art market and its interior designers.” Last October one sold for $362,500 at @lamodernauctions. Full story in November AD’s Object Lesson by @_h_mart_ and link in bio. Text @_h_mart_