The following lots of Warren McArthur furniture are an extraordinary grouping of prototypes designed and fabricated in the spring of 1934. This is the only suite of McArthur bedroom furniture known to exist. The pieces offered from this suite consist of a tall chest, a five-drawer bureau, a writing desk and chair, a nightstand and a radio stand. In addition, this grouping includes documented prototypes of occasional tables, which were later put into production (see McArthur Corporation standard furniture catalogue 1936 p.42). What adds to the unusual character of this offering is the amount of documentation that surrounds it. Diary entries chronicling the design and manufacture exist with weekly letters discussing the progress from drawing board to the owner’s final receipt of the furniture.

Warren McArthur moved his small furniture operation from Los Angeles to Rome, New York in the late fall of 1933. Don Schafer was Warren’s upholstery foreman and the only one of four salaried employees to have his relocation paid for by the company. The winter of 1933 was extremely cold, with temperatures of 20 degrees below zero. Cars wouldn’t start and if you didn’t leave your water running your pipes were likely to freeze and burst. The business climate was almost as chilly as the weather outside. Warren offered the Schafers a grouping of furniture to be made to their specifications as part of the compensation package for moving to Rome and signing on for a two-year stint.

Their choice of furniture was a bedroom suite, a writing desk and four occasional tables. Don Schafer had suggested that a line of bedroom furniture would increase sales, but for reasons unknown, Warren McArthur never put this idea into production, thereby making this suite of bedroom furniture unique. The Schafers approved the final designs for their furniture in March 1934. The wooden drawers and cabinet modules were constructed of select-grade Adirondack white mountain birch and glazed in translucent lightly tinted lacquer. The anodized aluminum frames, while typical in construction, are dissimilar to all other pieces I have seen. For these pieces, McArthur used 1/2" by 1" rectilinear tubing for horizontal structuring versus 1/2" by 1 1/2" tubing, which was standard in all other furniture. While prototypes of any design are rare due to their very nature of being unique, we must look at history to understand the greater rarity of these.

The Warren McArthur Corporation closed at the end of 1948. A skeleton crew of eight continued work assembling aircraft seating to fill standing orders of a quarter of a million dollars. The aircraft seats had not been completed at the plant’s closing and were essential for the financial health of several major airlines and aircraft manufacturers. In addition, the liquidation of the then unsalable furniture division of the business was begun. Over the next 18 months, railroad cars loaded with crates of unused and obsolete parts were shipped to a mid-western salvage operator to be stored in his warehouse on the shores of Lake Erie. While the shipping of parts was continuing in the summer of 1949, a two-story house across the street from the main McArthur plant was emptied of all the seemingly worthless prototypes that it housed. Nearly twenty years of original design work – stacked in every room, from the basement to the attic – was removed, broken up and scrapped. The furniture drawings, blue prints and photographic files were taken to the local dump and burned.

The Reconstruction Finance Corporation had efficiently restructured another bloated postwar corporate client and the unwanted fat had been trimmed away. In the early 1970s, the warehouse containing tens of thousands of McArthur parts was damaged in a huge warehouse district fire. To contain the fire, the building and its contents were bulldozed into the water. The end of the Warren McArthur Corporation was complete.