Desk Design History: The Rise and Fall of Hideaways and Cubbyholes

In the '90s and early 2000s, everyone wanted an Aeron Chair. Industrial designers Don Chadwick and Bill Stumpf had created an icon and an office status symbol. However, can you name a single design for a desk that everyone coveted in recent years? I can't. Things were different a century and a half ago, when Indiana entrepreneur William Wooton introduced his Wooton Desk. Patented in 1874, the desk was designed specifically to accommodate the rise of correspondence; in the previous decade,...