Count Alexis de Sakhnoffsky was born in Russia in 1901, the son of an Advisor to Tsar Nicholas II. Following the Russian revolution he escaped to the continent and began a career as a motorcar designer emigrating to America in 1929. In America he designed many famous automobiles and his drawings of futuristic cars appeared in Esquire Magazine from 1934 on. In furniture he advocated streamline design as in the crescendo group of 1939 and the 1944 coronet group for Heywood Wakefield as well as the Bloomingdale’s Department Store furniture shown at the 1939-40 World’s Fair in New York.