Circa '70 Coffee Service

<p>In 1956 Gorham Manufacturing Company, the country’s leading maker and retailer of fashionable silver, recruited Donald Colflesh to bring a “contemporary dimension” to its traditional products. Colflesh’s most popular and successful design for the firm was the <em>Circa ’70</em> series, in which he brilliantly captured America’s ambition to go the moon. In this coffee service, the intersecting angles epitomize the era of space-age design, and the curving, upright thrust of the handles and spouts conveys the aerodynamics of the jet age. Gorham reinforced the coffee service’s space-age associations in accompanying pamphlets, noting its “feeling of vertical motion . . . the upward look to space.” The company’s name for the line, <em>Circa ’70</em>, also confidently alludes to the future and its possibilities. The sleek contours and elongated ebony finials and handles, however, were exceptional for mid-century hollowware and recall similar embellishments on early-20th-century Scandinavian silver.</p>