History of the term tulip to describe tables and chairs 1929-2014

Scott Howard office furniture supplies iconic designs from 1929 to the present day.

Historical records show that in 1955, Eero Saarinen launched a range of tables and chairs which he called his PEDESTAL GROUP furniture. In recent times, these have colloquially become known as tulip tables and chairs.

However a raft of similar products have also been called “Tulip”, either in their descriptions or their names.

Definitions such as tulip table, tulip chair, tulip base, tulip lamps etc. have become synonymous with a certain style of furniture. Even now today, here at Scott Howard, we have a number of reputable competing manufacturers still using the name tulip to describe their products.

However on the 30th of October 2012, in a stroke of pure genius, Knoll International Inc. trade marked the word “Tulip” in class 20 (furniture, seating, chairs, tables etc) under the registration number EU011306487. This now means that the word tulip is officially their intellectual property and as a result is protected solely for their use.

So after nearly 60 years of the world’s office furniture industry using the term tulip to describe a style of base, we now have to come up with something different. I can only admire the genius involved (even though I don’t like it) but it is now the law - so here at Scott Howard our pedestal based tables will now be known as Trumpet tables. We liked the name “Fluted” but someone in America trademarked that too, so Trumpet it is!

I have to admit that after nearly 40 years of personally using the word tulip to define any piece of furniture with a pedestal base I am finding it very hard to start using other words to define these styles of bases and I started thinking about the hundreds of products this registration now affects and here are just some of the many items affected – all the products shown below have used the term tulip in their descriptions.

Now that Knoll have trademarked the word tulip, it is only in a historical context that we can use the word tulip to refer to products from the past.

I STRESS THAT WE DO NOT SELL ANY OF THESE ITEMS -THEY ARE SHOWN HERE FOR GENERAL INTEREST ONLY.