Scottish architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh produced some of the most innovative designs of the early 20th century. This is one of his best-known chairs.
Mackintosh, his wife, Margaret Macdonald, and sister- and brother-in-law Frances Macdonald and James Herbert MacNair, were leading exponents of the Glasgow Style, which became so influential at the turn of the 20th century. Mackintosh was exalted for his striking, rectilinear designs, which drew on Japanese aesthetics and utilized natural materials. Mackintosh was commissioned by Miss Catherine Cranston in about 1896 to design some murals for one of her tea rooms. This high-backed chair sat in 205 Ingram Street. It is an elongated version of an earlier dining chair that had a single pierced square in the central back splats. The High Back Chair has three extra pierced squares at the top of each of the central back splats. The original chairs were stained dark brown oak to contrast with the airy interiors, but the original design shows that they were intended to be stained green.
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Original chairs are rare. They can be seen in museums globally.
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Freud Ltd makes this chair to the original specifications in solid European oak, with removable seat pads covered in unbleached calico. A chair costs about £450 (US $750).
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Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society www.crmsociety.com
Freud Ltd www.freud.eu
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The celebrated architect Le Corbusier used the model 209 chair, better known as the Wiener Stuhl Chair, in many of his buildings. He called it a piece of great ‘nobility’.
Architect August Thonet designed the Stuhl Chair in 1904. It has been praised by designers and the public since then. Its minimalist simplicity and elegance are typical of the Viennese Gebrüder Thonet company’s designs. It still manufactures the chair today.
Like the father of all bentwood chairs, Model No. 214 (also known as the ‘Vienna Coffee House Chair’) which was designed by Gebrüder Thonet founder Michael Thonet in the 1850s, the Stuhl Chair is made up of six pieces. Its genius rests in the back piece and back legs of the steamed bentwood, which are moulded almost sculpturally from one piece of solid beechwood.
Paying tribute to August Thonet’s Stuhl Chair, acclaimed French architect and industrial designer Le Corbusier declared, ‘Never has anything been created more elegant and better in its conception, more precise in its execution, and more excellently functional’.
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The original chair has a back section and back legs made from one piece of solid moulded beech.
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Reproductions are available in several colours with different styles of seat. Plywood seat £459 (US $709); cane seat £486 (US $761); perforated plywood seat £470 (US $736); upholstered seat and back, fabric £619 (US $970); upholstered seat and back, leather £747 (US $1,174).
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TwentyTwentyone www.twentytwentyone.com
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Josef Hoffmann was a great admirer of Charles Rennie Mackintosh; he believed that Mackintosh’s work was both forward-thinking and beautifully crafted. Architect Hoffmann helped found the influential Wiener Werkstätte in Vienna, which was influenced by the English Arts and Crafts Movement. As one of the first commissions for the Werkstätte, Hoffmann undertook to design the exterior and furnishings of the Purkersdorf Sanatorium in Vienna. His ‘Sitzmaschine’ pays more than a nod to Philip Webb’s Arts and Crafts Morris Chair (1866). It also illustrates how innovations in construction techniques were filtering through to commercial design. The reclining chair’s exposed and streamlined form is made up of bent-beechwood curves and a back panel of sycamore pierced with open geometric grids. The rows of knobs on the adjustable back combine both functional and decorative elements that are typical of the Viennese Werkstätte style.
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The original chairs are hard to find but one came up at Christie’s recently and sold for £15,151 (US $23,750).
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J & J Kohn produced several different versions of the Sitzmaschine, some with cushioned seat and backrest, until 1916.
Be careful to check listings carefully. Vitra makes a miniature version of the chair for about £200 (US $313) – considerably less than the auction price listed above.
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MoMA www.moma.org
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Kaare Klint is, for many people, the true father of Danish design. In 1924, Klint was one of the driving forces in the founding of the Furniture School at Copenhagen’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts, where he also taught such creative geniuses as Poul Kjærholm. He believed in thoroughly researching any project that he undertook so that it would be designed to best fit the task for which it was meant, while also being beautifully crafted and attractive to look at. The Faaborg Chair was conceived in 1914 as part of the commission that he and mentor Calle Peterson undertook to design the furniture and fittings for the Faaborg Museum. The brief – to create a light and easy chair that could be placed by visitors in front of any painting they wanted to look at – was fully met. Drawing on classical lines, the Faaborg Chair has a curved back that was originally produced in French rattan, as was the seat. From 1964 onwards, it was made with a fixed seat cushion.
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The original chair was produced with a French rattan seat and back.
A modern mahogany or European cherry version with an oxhide seat can cost £3,939 (US $6,352).
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Rud Rasmussen has manufactured the chair since 1931.
If you buy a chair with a fixed cushioned seat in Niger leather, oxhide or fabric, it will have been made after 1964.
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Rud Rasmussen www.rudrasmussen.com
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Dutch architect and furniture maker Gerrit Thomas Rietveld first developed the design for an unpainted armchair based on geometric principlesin 1917–18. The design was the prototype for what would become – in its painted form – the Red/Blue Chair and it was a realization of the Amsterdam-based De Stijl movement’s principles. Rietveld sought to create spiritual harmony through the merging of geometry and primary colours. The Red/Blue Chair was one of the first examples of the application of this philosophy in a three-dimensional form. Rietveld originally painted it in grey, black and white, but after seeing fellow De Stijl member Piet Mondrian’s abstract red, blue, yellow and black paintings he repainted it in those colours. Rietveld intended it to be produced for the mass market and so kept the design simple. The chair created a sensation when it was first shown and it has since become an iconic piece of 20th-century design.
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This chair is in major design collections, such as MoMA.
The chair was intended for mass production so the original pieces of wood were standard lumber lengths for the time.
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Cassina makes a stained beech version for about £1,660 (US $2,602). A maple self-assembly kit, supplied with the original design and Gorilla Glue is also available for £65 (US $149).
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Cassina www.cassina.com
See also
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The seamless tubular steel of the Adler bicycle that Marcel Breuer rode around Dessau in Germany inspired him to develop a range of furniture from the same material. That wish, combined with the desire to design a chair supported by a single base – a cantilever chair – led to the B3. Both functional and comfortable, Breuer’s chair was also stylish and modern. The original was made for just a few years before the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. However, in the consumer boom following the war, well-designed, mass-market furniture was in demand and the B3 was manufactured by Gavina in Bologna, Italy, and distributed through Stendig. Now marketed as the ‘Wassily Chair’(artist Wassily Kandinsky received an early prototype made of canvas (or wire-mesh) fabric straps with a bent nickelled-steel frame), the straps were replaced
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