Howell Chrome Furniture: The Design Patent That Didn't Survive Its Own Lawsuit

By Matthew Partsch · Owl and Twig Vintage · October 20, 2026

A chrome tubular rocking chair, photographed around 1934 for a company catalog, carries a caption naming its maker as Howell Manufacturing Co., of Geneva, Illinois — no other credit, no model number, just the company name under the picture. Three years after that photograph was taken, Howell's own patent on a chair design very much like it was thrown out of federal court.

A flatiron foundry reinvents itself in chrome

William H. Howell opened a foundry on the west side of the Fox River in Geneva, Illinois, making cast-iron doorstops and coal- and stove-heated sad irons for flattening laundry. Electric irons took over that market through the 1920s, and the company's new owners converted the factory to steel-framed furniture instead — cast-iron furniture first, in 1923, then, starting in 1929, seamless chromium-plated tubular steel frames sold under the trademark Chromsteel.

Chromsteel furniture went national at the 1933 Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago, where Howell's tubular steel pieces furnished several model houses and commercial pavilions. Co-owner William McCredie met Wolfgang Hoffmann at the fair and hired him in 1934 to run Howell's design department. Hoffmann, Vienna-born and the son of architect Josef Hoffmann, had moved to the United States in 1925; a 1938 Howell sales catalogue called him an authority on modern furniture who designed "for Howell exclusively," and he held that post until 1942, when the factory converted to wartime production — bombs, shells, airplane wings, and Navy mess trays, among roughly 500 workers — and Hoffmann left to become a photographer in Chicago.

The design patent Howell took to court — and lost

Hoffmann filed for a design patent on a chair on February 5, 1935. U.S. Design Patent D96,183 issued July 9, 1935, assigned to the W. H. Howell Company of Geneva, a corporation of Illinois, claiming "the ornamental design for a chair, as shown" — a modernistic frame with a streamlined, curved rear leg built from two separate pieces of tubular steel.

Howell sued a competitor, Royal Metal Manufacturing Co., for infringing that patent. The case reached the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit as Howell Co. v. Royal Metal Manufacturing Co., decided December 14, 1937, with Judge Lindley writing for the panel. Royal Metal's defense did not dispute copying the look — it argued the design wasn't original to Hoffmann at all, pointing to Austrian Patent No. 684, granted July 1, 1899, to an inventor named Tschofen, for a chair built on the same two-piece tubular frame, differing mainly in how the pieces curved. A court-appointed master had already agreed and held the patent invalid; the district court adopted that finding and dismissed Howell's case outright. The Seventh Circuit affirmed.

Losing that case didn't cost Howell its business. It cost Howell the one piece of paper that might have stopped Royal Metal, or anyone else, from building the same chair.

A trademark that remembers only half the company's history

Chromsteel was Howell's actual brand on the furniture this guide is about, used continuously from 1929 through the Hoffmann years and beyond. A search of the federal trademark registry turns up no registration for that name at all — not active, not expired, not cancelled. If Howell ever filed for it, no record of that filing has surfaced.

What is on file is a later, plainer mark: HOWELL itself, Registration No. 1,117,705, filed November 1, 1977, registered May 8, 1979, covering "metal furniture — namely, chairs, tables, coffee tables, bed frames and bed rails." The filer was Burd, Inc., which had bought the by-then-struggling company from Acme Steel's successor in 1975 — a worker strike followed, the St. Charles plant never reopened, and its equipment was sold off in 1980, within a year of the registration going through. The registration itself was cancelled under Section 8 in 1985 for failure to file a renewal affidavit, six years after it issued.

The registration's own sworn first-use date is 1966. Chromsteel furniture had been on the market since 1929, Hoffmann's design patent dated to 1935, and the company's chrome-furniture era was already winding down by the time 1966 arrived. Nothing in the filing explains the 37-year gap between when Howell's name actually started appearing on furniture and the date the company's eventual owner swore to in Washington.

How to tell a real one

Start with the metal itself. Chromsteel is chromium-plated steel, not aluminum or a modern chrome-look alloy — a magnet will cling to a genuine piece and skate past most later reproductions built in lighter metal, the same basic test this blog's own guide to identifying brass recommends for telling plated steel from solid or plated non-ferrous metal.

• Look for "Howell" stamped or decaled on the underside of a seat, a table apron, or a chair's cross-brace — Howell's own catalog photography rarely shows a visible mark on the furniture itself, so an unmarked piece needs other evidence before it gets called genuine.
• A curved, two-piece rear-leg frame, the feature at the center of the invalidated D96,183 patent, is common to the whole Chromsteel catalog, not unique to any one Hoffmann design — it identifies the era and the general design language, not a specific attribution on its own.
• Treat any dealer listing that hedges with "after Hoffmann" or "in the style of Hoffmann" as exactly what it says: a design that resembles his work, not a documented Howell piece.

Richard Wright, founder of the Chicago design auction house that has sold more catalogued Hoffmann lots than any other venue checked for this guide, told Interior Design in 2013 that copying is a real problem his team watches for in what it sells. The same interview gives his standard for what gets through: "It all starts with desirability, and we have set criteria of what we're looking for." A chair that looks right but carries no mark, no catalog history, and no prior sale record is a judgment call, not a certainty.

The look-alikes

Royal Metal Manufacturing Co. — the company that won the 1937 lawsuit — kept building its own chrome tubular seating under the brand name Royalchrome, including armchairs, club chairs, sofas, and a three-seat office sofa with the same curved-leg, bent-tube look Howell had tried and failed to lock up. Because the court found the Hoffmann design unoriginal rather than finding that Royal Metal had copied something protectable, nothing in that ruling stopped Royal Metal, or any other maker, from continuing to build chairs that look essentially the same. Today's secondary market reflects that: pieces attributed to Royal Metal sometimes carry the same designer names — Hoffmann, Kem Weber — that dealers reach for on Howell pieces, occasionally hedged with "after" or "style of" and occasionally not.

Hoffmann's own work muddies the water further. A three-piece chrome lounge suite — two armchairs and a sofa, sprung cushions, applied manufacturer's labels — sold at Sworders in England in 2026, catalogued as designed by Hoffmann in 1935 and made not by Howell but by Lloyd Manufacturing Company of Menominee, Michigan, a maker better known today for its woven Lloyd Loom furniture. That date sits squarely inside the years Howell's own 1938 catalogue would later claim Hoffmann worked "for Howell exclusively." A buyer who assumes every Hoffmann-labeled piece from the 1930s came out of Geneva, Illinois, is assuming more than the record supports.

What Howell chrome furniture sells for

Wright, the Chicago design auction house, has sold catalogued Wolfgang Hoffmann lots at realized, hammer prices across two decades: a side table for $358 (February 2021), a telephone table estimated at $1,500–2,000, a lounge chair for $2,760 (June 2002), and, at the top end, a coffee table estimated at $3,000–4,000 that brought $9,000 (December 2006). Not every lot title specifies Howell by name — Hoffmann's documented chrome-furniture career ran only through his 1934–1942 tenure there — but the material, period, and catalogued attribution line up with his Howell years in each case checked for this guide.

A comparable Hoffmann piece made for a different manufacturer gives an outside data point: the Lloyd Manufacturing lounge suite mentioned above sold for £400, roughly $500, at Sworders in July 2026 — a confirmed hammer price, not an estimate. Current asking prices on dealer sites such as 1stDibs and Chairish for Howell- and Hoffmann-attributed chairs, benches, and tables run from several hundred dollars into the low thousands; those are asking prices only, not confirmed sales, and several carry no stated sale history at all.

"Buying into a proven asset is going to hold value over time," Wright said in that same 2013 interview, describing what he learned from the 2007–2008 downturn in the design market. "Supply drives demand." For a maker whose own signature patent didn't survive a lawsuit and whose name wasn't trademarked until decades after the furniture that matters was already in showrooms, documented sale history is doing more of the identification work than any mark on the piece itself.

Where the records disagree

Three points in this research did not resolve cleanly.

First, the founding date. A 2019 history contributed by the Geneva History Museum's own director dates William H. Howell's original foundry to 1866; a Howell exhibit at the Illinois Governor's Mansion dates the same foundry to 1867. Both describe the identical founder, place, and product — cast-iron doorstops and sad irons on the Fox River in Geneva — and disagree by one year.

Second, the trademark first-use date. Registration No. 1,117,705's own sworn first-use date is 1966, thirty-seven years after Chromsteel furniture went on the market and twenty-four years after Hoffmann left the design department. No source located for this guide explains that gap; it is recorded here as a gap, not a mystery solved.

Third, the exclusivity claim itself. Howell's 1938 sales catalogue stated that Hoffmann designed "for Howell exclusively." A Hoffmann-designed, manufacturer-labeled lounge suite dated 1935 — squarely inside that claimed exclusive window — was built not by Howell but by Lloyd Manufacturing Company. Either the catalogue's claim was already untrue when it was printed, or the Lloyd suite's 1935 date is itself in question; this guide did not find enough evidence to settle which.

For more on names that outlived or outran the companies behind them, see the guides to Naugahyde and Fiberglas. For the rest of the library, see the Field Guides index.