Art Nouveau grew out of the Arts & Crafts movement and shared some of its aspirations, but did not have an antipathy to the machine production process.
A variety of individual styles emerged from the movement, one of  the most striking, in the field of furniture design, being that of the architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh. There is a table designed by Mackintosh that bears a striking resemblance to the coffee table designed by E. W. Godwin, but it is listed as "Table" rather than "Coffee Table".
The British coffee tables and furniture that resulted from this movement eschewed the fussy decoration of the Victorian period and also the use of revivalist styles, and had clean simple lines, often with a strong emphasis on the vertical components and decoration based on natural forms. French furniture tended to have more sinuous lines and be more elaborate. The movement came to an end during the 1st world war and was succeeded, after the war, by Art Deco.
An example of an Art Noveau coffee table is shown on the right.

Art Deco drew its inspiration from contrasting sources including primitive art but also from modern forms such as aeroplanes. Its followers  distanced themselves from the romanticism of Art Nouveau and saw themselves as more representative of the machine age, they used geometric curves, rather than organic curves based on the plant world, and straighter lines. As with Art Nouveau, some architects and interior designers also became involved with furniture design. Art Deco continued as a movement up until the outbreak of the Second World War. One of the newly available materials in the 30s in the U.S.A. although it didn't reach Britain until around 1947 was decorative Formica laminate. It was taken up by Art Deco designers, and there were coffee tables produced with formica tops.  There were also many coffee tables designed using glass or glass and metal such as the two pictured in figures 1 & 2.
Eileen Gray was part of the Art Deco movement and designed the coffee table in fig 1.  She was originally an artist but went on to become a furniture designer and then an architect.

The Bauhaus in Germany: 1919-1933
In 1919 the German architect Walter Gropius took over the Weimer School of Arts & Crafts from the Belgium architect & furniture designer Henri Van de Velde, (one of the original founders of Art Noveau), and also the Weimer Academy of Fine Art and amalgamated them to form the Bauhaus.
The Bauhouse set out to produce a new generation of  architects, designers, artists & craftsmen who were designing especially for the mass production market & attempting to achieve a style for the 'machine age' that rejected the idea of applied surface decoration and relied on the purity of the form.
Mies van der Rohe the architect who took over as director of the Bauhaus in the 1930s designed the coffee table in fig 3. He famously used the phrase, "less is more,"  which epitomised the philosophy of the modernist movement.
The Bauhaus was closed under pressure from the Nazis in 1933.

Coffee Tables Development in Britain During & After the Second World War
The influence on the design of coffee tables and other furniture by these design movements along with the continuing development of industrial techniques lead to the production of  coffee tables in materials other than wood, such as glass and metal, and also, in time, to designs using formica and ultimately acrylic.
However, in Britain, between the wars, despite the existence of these modern designs and materials, mass produced coffee tables and other furniture were still primarily being produced in wood and in overly ornamented revivalist styles.
 During the Second World War the shortage of timber lead the Board of trade to appoint a committee of designers to lay down simple standard designs for mass production of what was called utility furniture. This led to cleaner lined, simpler, functional furniture more fitted for mass production.  The British Design Panel had drawn up designs for further ranges of utility furniture to be produced after the war but had to abandon their plans. Utility furniture was not popular with the public at large, being associated with the austerity of the war years.  The large furniture manufacturers, mindful of what would sell, simply reverted to applying machine made applied ornamentation to their designs.
However, throughout the late 40s and early 50s, public attitudes started to change, the memories of the war years and rationing were beginning to recede, newly built housing, for the most part, had larger windows and smaller rooms with lower ceilings than their Victorian counterparts creating a different, lighter type of space.  A space in which the heavily ornamented, bulky, dark stained Victorian furniture began to look out of place.
It took until 1954 for this growing demand to be recognised by the major manufacturers.  That year saw E. Gomme Ltd, a High Wickham furniture manufacturer, launch the G Plan range of furniture. This was to be affordable furniture designed in a modern style, and the first to be promoted directly to the customer with national advertising, and displayed in showrooms in simulated room layouts. It became hugely popular throughout the sixties and was imitated by other furniture manufacturers.  G Plan was one of the first companies to popularise teak Scandinavian design. There were many G plan coffee tables designs often combining wood with other materials like the table pictured on the left. 
 In 1964 Terence Conran opened the first Habitat selling modern designs of furniture, he was one of the first retailers to introduce pine furniture to Britain and the proliferation of cheap pine coffee tables and other furniture has continued till this day.  The introduction of pine coffee tables was symptomatic of a moving away generally from the taste for dark stained furniture like the oak and mahogany favoured by the Victorians to lighter woods like pine, maple, birch, and beech.
Since the 60s shops like Ikea have helped spread the concept of flat pack furniture which is often composed of chipboard covered with either a wood veneer or melamine designed to look like wood grain rather than being solid wood.
 As for the present time, as is befitting in this century where consumer choice is King, there now exists a plethora of styles. Revivalism never disappeared during the last century, there was an Art Deco revivalist movement in the 70s for instance, and it seems that the conflict between revivalism and modernism will never be resolved.  Just as some people will always prefer to live in a period property and some in a modern apartment, some consumers prefer traditional styles and some prefer modern styles of coffee tables. 
  Nowadays, you can buy a mass produced wooden coffee table in virtually any reproduction style you like or in a cleaner lined more contemporary design. Glass topped coffee tables in modernist designs are available as are coffee tables in a variety of materials from bamboo to wrought iron and, thanks to the Internet, obtainable from around the world.
Makers of fine furniture still exist and train apprentices in the craft of fine furniture design & construction, (e.g. The Edward Barnsley Workshops near Petersfield in Hampshire), There also exist many small workshops making custom country coffee tables as I do.


Researched & written by TheCoffeeTable.co.uk
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Telephone: 01420 474862

Acknowledgements: Image of Art Nouveau hinge table
reproduced courtesy of Jane at oldplank.com


READING SOURCES: The Country Life book of English Furniture - Edward T Joy. Pub: Hamlyn.  The New Architecture And The Bauhaus - Walter Gropius.  Pub: Faber & Faber.  Mies van der Rohe - Peter Blake. Pub: Penguin Books. Going for a Song: English Furniture - Max Robinson. Pub: BBC. Miller’s Antiques Price Guides - Martin & Judith Miller. Pub: Millers Publications.  Diary of Samuel Pepys - Pub: George Allen & Unwin Ltd.  Victorian Furniture - R.W. Symonds & B.B. Whineray Pub: Country Life Ltd.  Wikipedia online encyclopedia.