Chairs that blur the line between art and design
Askew Chair in Red Gum Eucalyptus by Further Ther
A rural relic reborn. Hewn from a single slab of Red Gum Eucalyptus, the Askew Chair allows the tree’s inherent twists and live-edge contours to dictate its final silhouette. Branch scars become structural accents, grain patterns the blueprint. Each iteration is singular, assembled with reverence for the wood’s memory—an object that feels less designed than discovered, its asymmetry a quiet rebellion against symmetry’s tyranny.
SERWAA by Giles Tettey Nartey
A West African Lobi chair reinterpreted for the modern gaze. Carved from one monolithic trunk in the tradition of the Lobi people, SERWAA retains the low-slung posture and skyward-angled backrest that once anchored communal rituals across Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, and Ghana. The seat demands an unconventional sit—legs splayed, weight distributed across three deliberate points—transforming ergonomics into anthropology. In polished iroko, it grounds a space with ancestral authority.
Ephemerality made eternal. Seoul-based Seungjin Yang coats clusters of inflated balloons in layer upon layer of resin, freezing childhood levity into structural permanence. The resulting armchair—a glossy constellation of candy-colored orbs—defies its apparent fragility, supporting weight with the quiet confidence of a magician’s reveal. Each curve captures the moment before a pop, suspending playfulness in high-gloss permanence.
Plain Clay Chair by Maarten Baas
Vulnerability cast in clay. Hand-molded over a steel skeleton, the Plain Clay Chair bears the imprint of its maker’s palms in every wobbly leg and sagging seat. Pigmented at the clay’s core rather than lacquered at the end, the matte surface amplifies the tactility of fingerprints and the tremor of human touch. It teeters on the edge of collapse yet endures—an artifact of naive expressionism that invites the sitter to share in its precarious poetry.
Jam Seat Brass by Lionel Jadot
A century-old prototype resurrected in planar brass. Adapted from a 1905–1910 Vanhamme family sketch, Jadot’s Jam Seat distills the chair to four interlocking sheets of cut brass, assembled like a geometric puzzle. Predating Rietveld’s Red and Blue by a decade, its streamlined planes reject ornament for pure materiality. The brass ages with use, accruing patina like a palimpsest of touch—a reclaimed relic that collapses time into a single, gleaming gesture.
Gradient Fauteuil by Philipp Aduatz
Concrete dyed in real time. Collaborating with incremental3d, Aduatz employs 3D concrete printing to embed color gradients directly into the nozzle, pixel by pixel. The Gradient Fauteuil emerges as a monolithic study in chromatic transition—ochre bleeding into umber, surface rippling with the precision of digital topography. What reads as soft ombre from afar reveals itself as hard-edged strata up close, a haptic paradox where mathematics meets the hand.
These chairs do not merely accommodate the body—they interrogate it. Each is a provocation in material honesty, cultural memory, and technological daring, proving that the act of sitting can be an encounter with the sublime. In their presence, design dissolves into art, and the everyday becomes extraordinary.
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