Maxine Snider, the founder and principal designer of Maxine Snider Inc., offered her first collection of classic modern furniture in 1998, customized for fashionable homes, hospitality, corporate, and public spaces. Since then, the collection has grown from ten pieces to fifty and won coveted awards for design.

Snider’s elegant furniture reflects her personal style, a signature tied to the designer’s passions, history, and travels. Tailored, polished, and refined, her work draws on classical traditions, interpreting them with a fresh and modern twist. The beds, seating, writing desks and tables all effuse her distinctive blend effortlessly with a broad range of furnishings, from antique to contemporary.

Snider’s design degree from the University of Michigan’s College of Architecture and Design led her to a varied career, first as a graphics specialist for the corporate world, and later heading the interior design departments of several distinguished architecture firms, among them Minoru Yamasaki and Associates, architects of the World Trade Center.

She founded her own interdisciplinary studio in 1989, providing space planning and interior design services as well as corporate identity, signage, and packaging programs. Ultimately, as Snider’s focus on interior design increased, "I became more and more interested in the design of furniture, and the merging of its sensibilities with architecture. It was an enormous advantage to have come from the discipline of interior design to understand the context in which a product lives." 

On an extended solo trip to Paris and its environs in 1997, Snider had the privacy and time to study in the library at the Musee D’Orsay, and to sketch the visual details of the city, recording the particularity of the architecture, antiques, and streetscapes. Inspired by that personal record of information and drawings, she determined to give form to her experiences and to create her first ten-piece furniture collection, aptly named “The Paris Series”. 

Now numbering fifty pieces, with the addition of subsequent collections, the designs remain true to Snider's vision. "When I'm asked to describe our furniture, I hesitate to reduce its style to a word. Like all labels, a name falls short of capturing all that inspires me. Furniture movements that I admire-------the Shakers, French modernists, Scandinavian design, and the simple beauty of Japanese everyday objects------all influence me. Art, politics, fashion, and the culture-at-large also spark new ideas. My life as a designer is my response to these powerful experiences, my way of sorting out what they mean. They inspire me to create things of beauty and of use------striving always to be relevant, to be original, and to enhance people's lives."