industrial designers Mary and Russel Wright
In 1950, industrial designers Mary and Russel Wright published
stpment the “Guide to Easier Living,” a handbook for the modern home intended to liberate women from old-fashioned formal entertaining, and families from old-fashioned and high-maintenance furniture.
Guide to Easier Living
“The beauty of an eighteenth-century drawing room was the perfect expression of its time, but it is not a perfect expression of ours,” they wrote. “A home carefully planned around the requirements of your own family will provide much richer satisfactions. Imitation of other people’s ways holds pale pleasure at best beside that of creating one’s own.”
The easier living the Wrights described—both in the book and in their lines of domestic products — sounds very familiar today, with buffet suppers, one-pot meals, portable seating and lots of double-duty storage. But the Wrights’ work was revolutionary at the time: not only did they simplify our plates and mugs, chairs and cabinets, but they simplified the way we were to live and work in our homes. Many other designers and
stpment manufacturers created modern design for the home in the 1950s, but few showed how to use it with the detail and multimedia platform the Wrights used so effectively. Without the tools for contemporary life they and others provided, our lives today would run very differently. But have we truly achieved the easier living that the Wrights preached?
