I recently purchased the walnut octagonal extension dining shown on the right in the first photo. Online research confirmed it was made by Foster McDavid of Tampa, FL, though many sellers attribute it to Harvey Probber. There’s not a lot of info online about Foster McDavid but here’s what I found.
Foster McDavid was a Tampa furniture company started by Robert Foster and Joe McDavid in the early 1950s that operated until it was sold in 1975. They had showrooms in High Point and Miami and sold to interior designers and retailers. According to online posts by Robert Foster Jr., Foster designed the furniture and McDavid ran the factory. Apparently Herbert Saiger designed some pieces for them as well but I could not determine which ones.
I assume the Probber attributions got started because this table is similar to some Probber designs, such as the one on the left in the first photo. Some of their other pieces included the chair on the right in photo two, obviously based on Jens Risom’s “Playboy” chair, shown on the left. This was discussed in a thread here in 2018 with @cdsilva providing the model info. And the third photo shows a “Malabar” chair by Galloway’s Furniture (also of Tampa) on the left and Foster McDavid’s version on the right.
Robert Foster had no design training from what I could find. According to his son, after flying B17’s in WW2 he worked as a furniture salesman for Maas Brothers department store before starting the company with McDavid. It appears they “adapted” other popular designs of the time and sold them as their own, a la Adrian Pearsall and Craft Associates.
Here is a similar version to your table from 1963 Furniture Forum. The page doesn't give the table model for some reason, but notes that their dining tables come standard with one leaf, but can be expanded to three, and that pedestal tables have drop-down legs.
Since the term "pedestal tables" is plural, one could assume that your table was a variation of the depicted one from the same year.
@cdsilva Thanks for the Furniture Forum page. It looks like they had showrooms across the country, at least by 1963. My table has all three leaves, the hinged drop-down legs, , walnut inlays, and Walter of Wabash slides with steel gears. Interesting that the inlays came in both burl walnut and cobalt vinyl . Here's a photo of one of the cobalt inlays.
@tktoo2 It looks like there may have been a tag underneath at some point. Now the only marks are these hand written numbers on the underside of both halves of the octagon.
This dining set is up for auction in a few days and also for sale on Etsy. The seller lists it as designed by Milo Baughman “for the Foster McDavid Furniture Company in 1965 which was later purchased by Dillingham”.
There’s no evidence Baughman designed for either company and Foster McDavid was sold to Trogdon Furniture in 1975. So it seems to be another example of Foster appropriating someone else’s design, in this case Merton Gershun's Esprit chairs for Dillingham.
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