Luxury design brand HOLLY HUNT presents The First Collection by Vladimir Kagan Design Group, translations of a table and chair that the influential designer crafted for his parents’ home in 1947.
With Kagan’s designs in the HOLLY HUNT portfolio since 2016, the brand continues to highlight select pieces, in collaboration with Chris Eitel, director of design and production, Vladimir Kagan Design Group. “Chris has reimagined vintage pieces from the archives as well as translated the Kagan DNA into original work,” said Jo Annah Kornak, senior vice president and executive creative director at HOLLY HUNT. “The First Collection represents a piece of design history—a moment in time when Vladimir was experimenting with design elements that would influence his later widely recognized, avant-garde aesthetic.”
Indeed, the furnishings, dubbed The First Chair and The First Table, are prime examples of the designer’s earliest work. Kagan studied architecture at Columbia University, and in 1947 joined his father, a cabinetmaker, at his woodworking shop. Eitel, who was also Kagan’s protégé, explained that this was a creative lab for the designer. “When he went to work in the family business it was an opportunity for Vladi to take some of his ideas and turn them into something,” he said. “He learned a lot just by being there, because he could have a piece made and then come back the next day and make little adjustments.”
The table and chair debuted in 1948 at the first Kagan store in Manhattan, but were phased out around 1950 when Kagan partnered with textile designer Hugo Dreyfuss, making it all the more unique. “As I went into the archives and started researching this period, I realized how rare the chair is,” Eitel noted. “It only had about a two-year lifespan from when it was designed and when they had it in the showroom. This is when Vladi starts doing the really organic stuff, and so The First Chair comes out of the line to make room for new pieces.”
Kagan is most known for his forms that take their cues from nature, including the ever-popular Serpentine Sofa, which he sculpted in 1949 and introduced a year later. “The Serpentine Sofa eschews the notion of a linear seating pattern, and instead introduces a curved form,” Kornak explained. “His work evokes a certain playfulness that proves modern furniture can also be whimsical.”
For Eitel, the original table and chair highlight Kagan’s embrace of both soft and structured features in his designs that are deftly balanced. “When I look at The First Chair and some of his early sketches, I think that he probably had a much more architectural aesthetic,” he said. “The buildings were rectilinear and kind of square, and I think Vladi was feeding off of that.”
Yet even with his training, Eitel explained that Kagan never became too rigid, and he let his own creative expression come into the mix, like artwork. “He loved to paint, and so I think there’s this artistic side to him that comes through. Playing with those early shapes started to spark him. Because he had the form down and had worked with square boards, he began to think about how he could carve into the wood. That’s what we see come after this chair and table.”
The Kagan team doesn’t make exact reproductions, but rather, furniture that echoes the original. Every piece is thoughtfully updated for today’s people and places, described as reintroductions. “Vladimir possessed this innate ability to change with the times and meet the modern moment—an ethos that has continued through Chris’s leadership,” Kornak added.
Kagan’s family let Eitel borrow The First Chair, and he was able to take measurements, but quickly realized that he would have to make some tweaks to make it look and feel right for a range of users; in keeping with Kagan’s belief that sofas and chairs were vessels to hold the human body. “The original piece is a very petite chair,” Eitel said. “It doesn’t really fit the size that we have for our homes in 2024. We tried to do as close to a one-to-one scale that we could.”
For the armchair version, Eitel had to rely on old photographs and plans to inform his vision for the new arm design. It was here that he could make the update suitable for more postures and body types, without sacrificing any of the style. “I didn’t have a lot of information on the arm, because I only had the side chair to go from,” he noted. “I sculpted the inside of it so that it was a little more comfortable as a person rests there. I feel like it is an appropriate change that we made, that’s true to the overall shape that Vladi would have had.”
The First Collection captures the progressive spirit of Kagan’s pieces, which Kornak said are sure to find a new audience of enthusiasts.“Vladimir was always innovating, striving to create furniture that would enhance the everyday human experience. The First Chair and Table are timeless, just as relevant today as they were when first designed.”
