Ross Littell; Designer of Furniture, Textile Patterns

Ross Littell, a textile and furniture designer who helped create a three-legged chair that became an American modern classic, died April 17 in Santa Barbara. He was 75.

The cause of death was a brain tumor, said his sister, Janice Currey of Malibu.

Littell was a partner of William Katavolos and Douglas Kelley in the 1950s when the three men created a piece of furniture called the T chair, an elegant three-legged construction of chrome and leather that resides in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and other top-ranked museums.

Littell was “one of the key designers during what was a golden moment for American design,” said Terence Riley, chief curator for architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art.

He and his partners are synonymous with the so-called Good Design movement of the 1950s, which produced furniture that was minimalist in style and usually rendered in lightweight materials. The three-legged chair of Littell, Katavolos and Kelley, Riley said, “is a kind of icon that represents very well and very appropriately the exuberance and innovation of mid-century American design.”

Littell was born in the flatlands of Hollywood and was raised in Los Angeles. His father was a tinkerer who worked in the Long Beach shipyards and later ran a furniture showroom in the Wiltern Building on Wilshire Boulevard. His mother was a bohemian who made batiks used in Cecil B. De Mille movies and took Littell and his sister on road trips to paint.

He won a scholarship to the Art Center School in Los Angeles (now Art Center College of Design in Pasadena) after graduating from Hamilton High School, but his training was interrupted by World War II and service in the Coast Guard. After the war, he entered Pratt Institute in New York, where he met Katavolos and Kelley. The three men formed a design studio in 1949 and produced a line of furniture for a New York company called Laverne Originals. The three-legged chair for that line became their best-known piece.

The three-man team won an award from the American Institute of Decorators for their furniture, which also included a coffee table made of tubular steel and wooden dowels. They produced wallpapers and award-winning fabrics that were exhibited at the Milan X Triennale and the Brussels World’s Fair in 1958.

Katavolos later joined the faculty of the Pratt Institute, where he teaches architectural theory, while Kelley runs a design and marketing firm in London. The furniture they designed with Littell is still in production and sought by collectors.

After their partnership dissolved, Littell opened his own studio in 1956 and worked as a freelance designer. The next year he went to Italy as a Fulbright scholar and studied the microscopic structure of natural forms. “When he went on his Fulbright, he took 2,200 photographs, all of pattern, [things like] how they do cobblestones in Paris. He was a very deep student” of design, said his friend and fellow designer David Rowland.

His studies led him to design textile patterns inspired by mathematical ideas. One of his most successful designs, called “Criss-Cross,” was part of a collection he produced for Knoll Associates in 1959 and won a citation of merit from the American Institute of Decorators.

Another of Littell’s textile designs, called “Border Riff No. 3,” which features broken black lines on an off-white background, has joined the three-legged chair in the Museum of Modern Art’s permanent collection.

In his later years, Littell focused on fine art, concentrating on metallic kinetic pieces called “Luminars,” exhibited at the Herman Miller Showroom in New York.

He moved to Santa Barbara in 1995, after living in Italy and Denmark for more than 20 years.

In addition to his sister, Littell is survived by two daughters, Louisa of Denmark and Hai-ja of Italy; a son, David, of Darien, Conn.; and six grandchildren.