ArtistGerman
Carl Straub
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Carl Straub was a German furniture designer whose output spanned roughly four decades of the twentieth century, from post-war reconstruction through the height of the brutalist interior movement. His earliest documented work appeared under the Goldfeder label in the 1950s, a German manufacturer that produced sofas and armchairs in solid wood and quality upholstery fabrics. These early pieces reflect the transitional moment between the soft organic lines of postwar European design and the more angular grammar that would define his later work.
Through the 1960s Straub developed a seating vocabulary built on teak and oak frames with leather upholstery, often in cognac and tobacco tones. Some of these pieces were marketed under the Gold Feather name, a variant branding used in Scandinavian export markets, and their construction quality and silhouette drew frequent comparisons to Danish mid-century design. Whether Straub worked with Scandinavian production partners or simply absorbed that aesthetic into a German context remains unclear from surviving documentation.
His most distinctive output came in the 1970s, when he produced a series of brutalist lounge chairs and seating groups in solid oak combined with slate, linen, leather, and bouclé. These pieces favor geometry over comfort: heavy horizontal and vertical members, exposed wood joinery, and upholstery held by leather buckles or linen tabs. Coffee tables from the same period pair thick slate tops with oak bases, treating weight and material contrast as primary design values. A Space Age lounge chair and table set attributed to the early 1980s shows he could also move in a softer, more futuristic direction.
Biographical details about Straub himself - dates of birth and death, formal training, studio location - have not been conclusively established in public records. His name appears consistently attached to a recognizable body of work, and the scale of his production suggests a professional workshop operation rather than a single craftsman, but documentation of his practice remains thin compared to contemporaries who worked for better-archived manufacturers.
On the secondary market his brutalist seating commands consistent interest, particularly sets in oak and leather from the 1970s. In the Nordic auction market, represented on Auctionist by 14 items across Stockholms Auktionsverk and Rheinveld Auktionen, his work appears primarily as chairs, armchairs, and occasional tables. Sold prices in this market have ranged from around 3,400 SEK for a group of plywood and glass armchairs to 9,508 SEK for a set of brutalist oak chairs, suggesting modest but stable collector demand for Scandinavian-facing examples of his German-made output.