Florence Schust Knoll Bassett (b. 1917, Saginaw, MI) was a distinguished interior and furniture designer, architect, and entrepreneur. She was orphaned at the age of 12 and was sent to boarding school at Kingswood School for Girls by Emile Tessin, in whose care she had been placed. She attended Kingswood from 1932-1934 where she was mentored by Rachel de Wolfe Raseman. She attended Cranbrook Academy of Art, studying architecture with Eliel Saarinen, interior design with Raseman, and weaving with Lilian Holm. After a year at Barnard College, Columbia University, in New York, she traveled to Scandinavia with the Saarinens during the summer of 1936. She returned to Cranbrook Academy of Art in the Architecture and Weaving departments for academic year 1936-1937, and again as a student of Architecture in the fall of 1939, following a year with the Architecture Association in London. In the winter and summer of 1940, she worked with Gropius and Breuer (Cambridge, MA), and Harrison and Abramowitz (New York) respectively, before studying with Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1940-1941. She was hired by Hans Knoll in 1943 working for his company, the Hans G. Knoll Furniture Company. They were married in 1946 and the company was renamed Knoll Associates, Inc. After Hans died in a car accident in 1955, Florence married Harry Hood Bassett in 1958 and moved to Miami, eventually retiring in 1965. She passed away in January 2019.