17 Facts About Louise Brigham

Louise Brigham was an American early-20th-century designer and teacher.

Louise Brigham was a pioneering champion of the use of recycled materials in furniture design.

Louise Brigham founded one of the earliest ready-to-assemble furniture companies, as well as the Home Thrift Organization to teach woodworking to New York City boys.

When Louise Brigham was only two years old, her mother died, and she was to lose her father when she was just 19.

Louise Brigham studied art and design in New York at the Pratt Institute and the Chase School of Art, as well as at art schools in Europe.

At some point in the late 1890s, Louise Brigham became involved in the settlement house movement and established Sunshine Cottage in Cleveland, Ohio.

Louise Brigham's father was an apothecary; the 1880 census shows the family living in Medford, Massachusetts.

Louise Brigham stayed in a camp managed by John Munro Longyear, a fellow Bostonian of her father's generation.

Under these difficult conditions, Louise Brigham undertook to design what she called "box furniture" for the camp out of those cast-off packing crates, following up on some earlier experiments along the same lines.

In 1909, Louise Brigham published a book of her designs for building furniture entirely out of packing crates entitled Box Furniture.

Louise Brigham offered complementary advice on curtain materials and overall color schemes.

Louise Brigham took a modular or sectional approach to some of her pieces, as several of the smaller pieces are designed in such a way that they can either stand alone or work as subunits of larger pieces.

In 1910, Louise Brigham showed "Room Delightful", an entire suite of box furniture for a child's room at a Child Welfare Exhibit in New York City.

The total cost of the box furnishings for Louise Brigham's apartment was around $4, or less than half of an average worker's weekly wage.

However, after the war information on Louise Brigham again becomes thin.

Henry Chisholm died in 1920, and in the ensuing years Louise Brigham worked on a new edition of her book and a memoir.

Louise Brigham died in the Sylvan Nursing Home in Trenton, New Jersey, on March 30,1956.