Prior to the modernist design movement there was an emphasis on torotno furniture as ornament, the length of time a piece took to create was often a measure of its value and desirability. During the first half of the 20th Century a new philosophy emerged shifting the emphasis to function and accessibility.

Western design generally, whether architectural or design of furniture toronto had for millennia sought to convey an idea of lineage, a connection with tradition and history. The Modern furniture movement sought newness, originality, technical innovation, and ultimately the message that it conveyed spoke of the present and the future, rather than of what had gone before it.

Modernist design seems to have evolved out of a combination of influences: Technically innovative materials and manufacturing methods, the new philosophies that emerged from the Werkbund and the Bauhaus School, from exotic foreign influences, from Art Nouveau and from the tremendous creativity of the artists and designers of that era.

An aesthetic preference for the baroque and the complex was challenged not only by new materials and the courage and creativity of a few Europeans, but also by the growing access to African and Asian design. In particular the influence of Modern Furniture Toronto design is legend: in the last years of the 19th Century the Edo Period in Japan, Japanese isolationist policy began to soften, and trade with the west began in ernest. The artifacts that emerged were striking in their simplicity, their use of solid planes of color without ornament, and contrasting use of pattern.

A tremendous fashion for all things Japanese - Japonism - swept Europe. Some say that the western Art Nouveau movement emerged from this influence directly. Designers such as Charles Rennie MacIntosh and Eileen Gray are known for both their Modern Furniture Toronto and Art Deco work, and they and others like Frank Lloyd Wright are notable for a certain elegant blending of the two styles..