This desk is one of our favorite furniture pieces – inspired by the Futurist design of the Los Angeles airport’s Theme building. The sleek and shining LAX Desk is available for sale through our Etsy shop. Or you can visit it, in person, at Moss HQ.
Matt got his professional start at the NewSchool in San Diego. When he came back home to Chicago, he brought a little bit of Southern California with him, in his love for SoCal’s iconic “Googie” architecture. Googie design is geographically localized on the west coast and represents the most exuberant optimism of the Space Age. Think of the Space Needle, designed for the 1964 worlds’ fair, the futuristic Jetson’s house, or the Chemosphere (flying saucer) house from the Charlie’s Angels movie.
Or picture this building, the central (and circular) restaurant floating above the LAX airport. The sleek arcing lines of support for the tower formed the inspiration for the LAX desk. Can you spot the design DNA in the graceful curving legs?
Building the LAX Desk
Of course there’s more to a great design than the point of inspiration. The powder coated steel legs needed to be designed for easy and accurate fabrication. You can see the result below. Arcs of hollow tube steel are joined with horizontal cross bracing with gentle curving connections and polished to a shine to give it that Space Age gleam.
The two parts – the reclaimed wood top and the sleek cold rolled steel base – are constructed separately and then assembled in our shop. Rather than than 60’s formica or plastic … we chose reclaimed Elm barnwood for the table top – a more contemporary material selection. The striated elm wood is polished to a glossy smooth finish, to highlight the natural irregularity that we love to use here at moss.
The touch-latch doors pop open with the pressure of a fingertip, and an open central storage area lets you whisk extra paperwork or computer keyboards quickly out of sight so that the desk top can speak for itself.
LAX Version 2.0
We use this desk in our own office – it serves as Laura’s command center – and we like it so much we’ve built several variations. This particular model went straight from the workshop to the customer … so we don’t have as many pretty pictures of it. But, we think it’s so sleek it makes even a woodshop look good. Wouldn’t you agree?
If you’d like to know more about the LAX desk … or would like to buy it … visit the page on our website or the Etsy sale page, or get in touch with us by phone or email. We’d love to see more of this beautiful walnut tree to off to good homes!
