Flame Interiors

Have you ever …

considered the chair you are sitting on? Have you ever thought about the fact that someone, somewhere, designed it to look and feel exactly the way it does? If you’re sitting on a cheap ole thing, you might even laugh at such a preposterous suggestion. If you’re sat in your Herman Miller desk chair, you might be feeling smug about having invested in something “designed” over a £39.99 chair from Viking Direct? Either way, the chair – you  chair – has a history.

So what?..

you might very well say. I doubt it though. If you really thought such things, you wouldn’t have clicked a link through to an Interiors blog now would you? So, I am assuming I have a captive audience? Marvellous.

You see …

when it comes to chairs, design matters. After all, if you’re going to invest in a statement piece, you really want it to look beautiful, interesting, or both. You might never want to sit in it. Maybe you just want to sit (somewhere else) and look at it admiringly, the way some women gaze lovingly at a pair of new shoes in a shop window? However, for most of us, we want something that is going to be comfortable, first and foremost, and functional to boot. We all know what a literal pain in the backside it is to sit on a badly designed chair after all. (Come on now, I can’t believe you’d be an exception to that rule?) So I thought I’d start at the beginning and see how we get on.

Years and years ago…

the evolution of the chair had slowed right down. If you were poor you’d most likely have been sat on something you’d whittled for yourself out of wood. If you were rich, you’d have perched upon something like this upholstered Louis XIV chair.

A typical Louis XIV chair

It’s not that…

chairs weren’t designed, or even differed from each other in “the olden days“, but they didn’t vary as much in design, ingenuity or invention as they have done since the turn of the last century. So, when we talk about “design classics,” which was the first chair to start turning heads? Well, it’s generally agreed to be this. The Bentwood Chair by Michael Thonet, 1859. (“Aha!” I hear you say, “the ‘Allo ‘Allo chair.“)

The Bentwood Chair. Michael Thonet, 1859

So, what’s so radical …

about the Bentwood Chair? Well, back in the day, furniture used to be made by carefully joining pieces of flat wood together (being careful to hide all the joins.) Thonet, not wanting to be held back by traditional methods, started to have a play around with other, newer ways of doing things. His eureka! came when he discovered he could steam wood and a metal strap together in such a way that the wood would not crack when shaped. Furthermore, it would also maintain it’s shape after being held together and dried out. Radical and modern for it’s time, but what’s more, it’s timeless too. In fact Modernist architect Le Corbusier said (during his lifetime some years later) “Never has anything been created more elegant and better in its conception, more precise in its execution, and more excellently functional.“

Other Thonet designs

We might …

know the Bentwood Chair better as the ‘Bistro‘ (or ‘Allo ‘Allo) chair 150 years later, but the fact that it’s still to be gracing our cafes in 2011 amongst its more modern rivals, really does mean that Thonet was just a little bit of a genius. Well done Thonet!

Fiona

Interior Designer, Flame Interiors
Interior design solutions for you in Bath, Bristol and the rest of UK

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This entry was posted on Friday, March 18th, 2011 at 3:14 pm and is filed under Chairs, Design History, Interior Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.