Circa '70 Coffee Service

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 Circa ’70 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, Circa ’70, 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.