Terence Harold Robsjohn-Gibbings (“Gibby” to his friends) first achieved prominence in 1937 for his reconstructions of classical Greek furniture. Of course, no actual ancient Greek furniture is known to have survived, but he was the first to attempt its recreation, which he based on imaginative sketches he had made of the furniture depicted in ancient vase paintings and bronzes in the British Museum. He later recalled, “On Greek vases I saw furniture that was young, untouched by time. . . . Vitality, surging through the human figures on the vases, surged through this furniture.”

In 1936 the thirty-one-year-old Robsjohn-Gibbings relocated, from his native London, to New York, where he commissioned a young American cabinetmaker to construct six pieces of furniture based on his British Museum drawings. He then placed these pieces in a showroom for his new office at 515 Madison Avenue. The showroom had bare white plaster walls (waxed rather than painted), bronze-sheathed double doors, a fireplace without a mantelpiece and a floor mosaic showing Dionysus driving a chariot drawn by panthers. The room’s uncompromising spareness emphasized the lithe quality of the furniture, and his career was launched.

A word often applied to Robsjohn-Gibbings’s work at the time was uncluttered. An admiring interviewer wrote in 1944 that the description “extends equally to his slim, well-tailored person and particularly to the smoothly-working intelligence that animates it.” The elegance of the showroom was certainly uncluttered compared with the colorful complexity of the period’s typical decorator showrooms, but what made it unique was its scholarly classicism. It was inconceivable that such other design greats as Elsie de Wolfe, Dorothy Draper or Rose Cumming would spend their over-booked and socially alert afternoons sketching furniture from Greek vases in the British Museum. Gibby’s ancient Greece brouhaha was in part an astute marketing strategy, yet it was also an inspired and highly original source of great design. His classical Greek furniture had a rather 1930s post-Déco glibness that ancient Greece surely lacked; however, it was unquestionably dapper and beautiful in its own right.

Robsjohn-Gibbings’s clients over the next several years included the fabulously wealthy Mrs. Otto Kahn, cosmetic and fashion legends Elizabeth Arden and Lily Daché, tobacco heiress Doris Duke and New York’s exclusive River Club. One important early commission was Hilda Boldt Weber’s house in Bel-Air, California, completed in 1938, which was later bought, with its contents, by Conrad Hilton.

In 1944 Robsjohn-Gibbings established himself as a tastemaker for the general public with a book titled Good-bye, Mr. Chippendale, which made irreverent fun of the American passion for reproductions of late-eighteenth-century Georgian furniture. He further opposed what he saw as the lifeless utilitarianism of modernists such as Le Corbusier, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Marcel Breuer, yet at the same time he admired the more organic and humanistic works of artists such as Pablo Picasso and Henry Moore.

He also maintained that a new generation of Americans would turn to Frank Lloyd Wright rather than to George III and Louis XVI. Robsjohn-Gibbings’s low-slung blond-wood furniture of the late 1940s shows striking evidence of Wright’s influence. The pieces, some of which began to be mass-produced by Widdicomb Furniture in 1946, influenced the work of many designers of the period. The characteristic look of the late 1940s and early 1950s—at once debonair and sybaritic—admired by connoisseurs today can be traced directly to Gibby’s pronouncement of 1944.

In the early 1960s, however, he returned to his classical beginnings. He and the Athens furniture firm Saridis joined forces in manufacturing pieces based on revised versions of his 1933 research at the British Museum, and he publicized their work with his book Furniture of Classical Greece.

In 1966 T. H. Robsjohn-Gibbings moved permanently to Greece, where he designed interiors for prominent Athenians. In the early 1970s he resumed the role of tastemaker with a series of Guest Speaker columns for Architectural Digest, where he continued to write until his death in 1976.

Photo by Yousuf Karsh