ManufacturerAmerican
Herman Miller
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Herman Miller is an American furniture manufacturer based in Zeeland, Michigan. The company was founded in 1905 as the Star Furniture Company by D.J. De Pree, who purchased it in 1923 with backing from his father-in-law Herman Miller - after whom the company was subsequently renamed. For its first two decades it produced conventional period-revival furniture, broadly typical of American domestic manufacturing at the time.
The company's direction changed sharply in the early 1930s when De Pree, facing financial pressure during the Depression, began working with the designer Gilbert Rohde. Rohde pushed Herman Miller toward modernist furniture suited to contemporary American homes and offices. After Rohde's death in 1944, De Pree hired George Nelson as director of design, a position Nelson held until 1972. It was Nelson who recommended bringing in Charles and Ray Eames, whose work with molded plywood and fiberglass helped define the visual character of mid-century American design. The Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman, introduced in 1956, became one of the most reproduced and widely recognized pieces of furniture of the twentieth century.
Beyond the Eames partnership, Nelson himself contributed substantially to the catalog - the Marshmallow Sofa, the Nelson Platform Bench, and a series of bubble lamps and wall clocks that combined sculptural playfulness with functional simplicity. The company also worked with Isamu Noguchi, whose coffee table for Herman Miller remains in production today.
In 1960, researcher Robert Propst joined the company to lead the Herman Miller Research Corporation. His studies of human behavior in office environments led to the Action Office system, introduced in 1964, which is widely credited as the world's first open-plan office furniture system. A later, more modular iteration - Action Office II - became the template for the office cubicle, a product that reshaped working life across the industrialized world during the following decades.
The Aeron chair, designed by Bill Stumpf and Don Chadwick and launched in 1994, marked another significant moment. Built around proprietary Pellicle mesh and designed in three sizes to accommodate a wide range of body types, it entered the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and was named Design of the Decade by the Industrial Design Society of America. In 2021, Herman Miller merged with Knoll to form MillerKnoll, one of the largest furniture groups in the world.
On Auctionist, Herman Miller appears across 38 lots, all currently ended. The catalog reflects the depth of the secondary market for mid-century designs: Eames DSS fiberglass chairs sold for 21,427 EUR at Rheinveld Auktionen, while Aeron chairs and Eames aluminum group pieces circulate regularly through Stockholms Auktionsverk. Swedish and German auction houses dominate the platform's listings, with Stockholms Auktionsverk Düsseldorf/Neuss, Sickla, and Rheinveld Auktionen appearing most frequently.