Phillips would like to thank Helen Thonet from Thonet GmbH for her assistance cataloguing the present lot.

At the Salon d’Automne of 1929, Charlotte Perriand, Pierre Jeanneret, and Le Corbusier liberally used glass and metal in order to reflect Le Corbusier’s idea of the house as “a machine for living in.” Their investment in mechanization went beyond the employment of industrial materials in their furniture: the designers, particularly Perriand, worked with Thonet to mass-produce the moveable pieces designed for the 1929 Salon. The goal of this collaboration was to make modern furniture more accessible to the public, and Perriand, Jeanneret, and Le Corbusier hoped to spread good design to those who could not afford their show pieces. Ironically, the B307 table and the eight other works in the series were the most expensive objects in Thonet’s catalog. Between 1930 and 1935, only 535 B307 tables were made, and by 1937 Thonet stopped production on the Salon d’Automne commission.