Designer's furniture prized by collectors

Phillip Lloyd Powell, a self-taught furniture designer who, working largely out of the public eye, produced elegant, sculptural pieces that are today highly prized by collectors, died March 9 in Langhorne, Pa. He was 88 and lived in New Hope, Pa.

Powell died after a fall, said George Gilpin, a friend and business associate. No immediate family members survive.

Though Powell's work is often described as midcentury modern, it routinely transcended the cool, clean lines associated with that style.

Powell's work has been shown at America House in New York, the Museum of the Philadelphia Civic Center and elsewhere. In 2006, an eight-foot-long wall-mounted cabinet he made in the early 1970s, topped with slate and with handles taken from the frame of a Sicilian donkey cart, sold at auction for $60,000.