Cleo Baldon Circular Dining Table for Terra Venice California late 1960s

Cleo Baldon dining table designed and manufactured by Terra based in Venice California in the late 1960s.

The table is in good condition with some minor wear to the top.

Cleo Baldon formed the partnership of Galper-Baldon Associates, a landscape architectural design firm, with Sid Grapher. Baldon oversaw virtually all the projects for Galper-Baldon Associates, with the exception of landscape plantings.[2] In 1985, Baldon told the Los Angeles Times that "I don't understand plants."[2] Her partner Sid Galper was the horticulturist. Baldon designed over 3,000 swimming pools in Southern California and held a design patent for the contour spa with ergonomic underwater seating. She has been credited with the development of the lap pool, which she claimed to have introduced to California in 1970.[1]

Aside from her architectural work, Baldon designed furniture and formed the California company Terra with Galper-Baldon partner Sid Galper. The company manufactured and sold quality outdoor furniture.[2]

Baldon never approached a furniture manufacturer with designs. She was too busy for that. But she happened to do a house for a client who had a manufacturer friend, and in the early 1960s she began supplying designs to the firm.

They were largely upholstered-seating designs, and Baldon believes that she was influenced by the outdoor trappings of the West--by saddles and cowboy boots.

(Some of her cushions were attached to chairs with straps like those that fasten a saddle onto a horse.) She also acknowledges some influence from the Mission-style chairs that she remembers from an aunt’s home.

In 1965 she and Galper founded the Terra company.

The idea was to sell a line of quality outdoor furniture “because there was nothing but Brown Jordan to put in the yard.”

That was not quite how things turned out, however, because Baldon introduced a line that sold phenomenally well.

What she did was to turn the metal legs and struts at an angle, so that instead of the flat edge being presented to one’s eye, the right angle at the corner is what’s noticed first.

“It’s more sculptural; it gives you another dimension. I’ve only seen it once anywhere else--in the grilles of a medieval house in Verona.”

Another successful Terra line is oak furniture coated with polyurethane.

“The oak keeps moving under it,” Baldon says. “Maybe that’s why the Druids favored oak--because the material is never dead. Cut it up and it wiggles in the night.”