The world's modern office chair was born in a Zeeland bedroom-furniture shop

In 1905 a small Zeeland shop called the Star Furniture Company started turning out exactly what its name promised — heavy, traditional, ornately carved wooden bedroom suites, the kind of furniture your great-grandparents saved up for. There was nothing modern about it. It was a respectable small-town factory making respectable old-fashioned beds and dressers, and for almost twenty years that was the whole story.

The name people know came later, and by accident of family. A young clerk named D.J. De Pree worked his way up to running the place, and in 1923 he talked his father-in-law into buying most of the shares. The father-in-law’s name was Herman Miller, and the company has carried it ever since — a man who put up the money and lent his name but never really ran a furniture business.

What turned this into a name designers whisper was the Great Depression. With the old bedroom suites no longer selling, De Pree met a designer named Gilbert Rohde, who told him bluntly that the future was not carved walnut headboards. Rohde pushed the company toward clean, practical furniture built for how people actually lived, and De Pree, to his lasting credit, listened. By the 1940s Herman Miller had pulled in Charles and Ray Eames, whose molded plywood and fiberglass chairs became some of the most copied objects of the century.

And in 1968 the company introduced Action Office — the panels and modular desks that grew into the office cubicle. Love it or curse it from inside one, the modern open-plan office traces straight back to this town. Not bad for a shop that started out selling ornate bedroom sets to Ottawa County farmers.