For most deeply rooted American furniture companies, heritage is confined to lookbooks and carefully edited timelines. And yes, Baker—founded by Dutch immigrant Siebe Baker in 1890—has all that. But the brand’s heritage was also hiding upstairs—not metaphorically, literally.
Updated living room classics in the Baker Reserve Collection include Laura Kirar’s Medida Sofa, the Ming Cabinet, and Barbara Barry’s Double X Back Lounge Chair and Round Tiered End Table. Also seen here: the Peking Cocktail Table from the Orlando Diaz-Azcuy Collection, the Manor Wing Chair from the Bill Sofield Collection, and the Onyx Table Lamp from the Susan Ferrier Collection.
The discovery happened in a little-known corner of the company’s longtime manufacturing facility in Connelly Springs, North Carolina—a vast, dark space that had slipped, like Miss Havisham’s lair, from the firm’s institutional memory over the years. But when someone remembered its existence, the team quickly investigated, wielding their cell phones as flashlights. (The electricity no longer worked—not that they expected glowing museum vitrines.)
What they found amounted to an aesthete’s archaeological dig. Beneath thick layers of dust and cobwebs was a warren of carved chair components, decorative wood fragments, forgotten prototypes, historic screens, archival fabrics, and stacks and stacks of hand-drawn plans. Some items were intact, but many existed only as bits and pieces. All were relics from different eras of Baker’s history, preserved as a de facto time capsule not by white-gloved curation but by omission.
Baker invited designers they’d collaborated with for years, including Barbara Barry, Jacques Garcia, and Laura Kirar, to revisit and refine their own iconic designs.
For a company that traces its lineage back more than 135 years, the discovery arrived at an opportune moment. In recent years, Baker has been looking inward, examining the elements that have defined the brand through generations of furniture making. They had already been planning a collection in testament to that—Baker Reserve—but once discovered, the treasures in the attic inspired them to revisit some of the company’s most recognizable forms for contemporary interiors. “Every piece within this collection is meaningful and has been reimagined to honor the past while offering new takes on designs that will be cherished for decades to come,” says Eric Graham, President of Baker-McGuire. This isn’t an exercise in nostalgia, but an investigation into what makes a design endure.
In Baker's workshops, artisans practice time-honored techniques—from carving and inlay to expert joinery—using the finest tools and materials, creating quality that only grows more apparent over time.
The Sorbonne Chair is the ultimate French slipper chair: distinctively shaped, generously scaled, and finished with a refined tapered leg. Designed by Paris-based Jacques Garcia, the chair now joins the Baker Reserve Collection.
The forgotten archive offered a roadmap. Among their discoveries in that dusty trove was a rattan shield-back chair that seemed to emerge directly from another era. Rather than simply reproducing it, designers studied the original and considered how it might evolve, adjusting the comfort level when necessary. The resulting piece remains recognizably connected to its predecessor while benefiting from decades of accumulated knowledge, and that tension became central to the collection.
The Vienna Dining Table by Laura Kirar pairs a rectangular tabletop with a distinctive and expressive leg design. Kirar’s Vienna Side Chair and Arm Chair are distinguished by carved medallions on the back, shown here in a burnished gold leaf finish. A pair of Odeon Cabinets by Thomas Pheasant set a dramatic stage.
Another aim: bringing some key voices back in conversation. Baker’s legacy is deeply intertwined with some of the design industry’s most influential figures; over recent decades, the brand has cultivated relationships with leading designers, including Los Angeles-based Barbara Barry and Paris-based Jacques Garcia. Rather than treating the unearthed archival designs as untouchable artifacts, the company invited those longtime collaborators to partner yet again. Familiar pieces were revisited, adjusted, and refined, making tapered legs more subtle or profiles a whiff lighter.
The Diamond Chest by Barbara Barry reveals beauty in the details, including solid carved doors in a diamond pattern, burnished gold leaf surfaces, and a bold red interior.
A longtime favorite from the Milling Road collection, the Asian-inspired Ming Sideboard is crafted from walnut and offers ample interior storage.
Take Barry’s Diamond Chest, whose faceted, solid carved doors and burnished gold leaf finish transform storage into sculpture, or the walnut Vienna Dining Table, with its graceful trios of shapely legs. Meanwhile, Garcia’s Sorbonne Chair proves that comfort and elegance are not mutually exclusive, reimagining the classic slipper chair with generous proportions and French polish. The entire collection nods to design’s greatest strength: its ability to reinvent itself.
This lighter, more feminine take on a living room features more classics from the Baker Reserve Collection, including Barbara Barry’s Loose Back Sofa, Loose Back Chair, Oval X Back Lounge Chair, and Fluted Table, as well as the Low Cabinet. Also shown are the Zigzag Cocktail Table from the Thomas Pheasant Collection and Barbara Barry’s Dias Taper Lamp.
When they were exploring the archive, employees uncovered stacks of original blueprints, their characteristic cyan hue reminding younger colleagues how the documents earned their moniker in the first place. Each drawing showed how design evolved before computer modeling existed, complete with pencil marks and annotations, all proof that heritage is most valuable when it’s treated not as a pristine museum piece but as ever-evolving raw material.
