Your Home Needs This: bentwood chair

Your Home Needs This #05: Thonet’s bentwood chairs

I’m welcoming in another week in January with another ‘Your Home Needs This’ post, where I profile a must-have design object that is on my wishlist or in my own home. You know, pieces of furniture that are beautiful, but functional and timeless too, that you keep seeing popping up in all those swoon worthy Pinterest and magazine shots. This time it’s the turn of Thonet’s classic bentwood chair – the king of chairs, if you like.

This iconic coffee house chair was developed and perfected by German-Austrian cabinet maker Michael Thonet when he started experimenting with bending solid wood in the 1850s. Thonet’s technique made use of solid rods of beech that were less prone to splitting than other species such as oak or birch. The rods were placed in a pressure vessel, where steam would be applied until the resin surrounding the timber fibres became pliable. The wood could then be bent around the form and left to cure, forming the sculptural curve of the bentwood chair.

Your Home Needs This #05: Thonet's bentwood chairs
Bentwood chairs look great mis-matched around a dining table via Entrance
Your Home Needs This #05: Thonet's bentwood chairs
Bringing together white walls and an old vintage table via Stadshem

The chair’s clean lines and economical use of material (comprising just six parts) anticipated the modernism of the 20th century and the move from workshop to mass production for the first time. Some 36 disassembled chairs could be packed into a 1m2 box, to be shipped and assembled on site. Instantly popular, his designs were soon seen in all the fashionable Vienna cafes, before being transported to the rest of Europe and world-wide through design fairs. It won Thonet a gold medal for at the Paris World Fair 1867. Later, famous modernist Swiss architect Le Corbusier was an advocate, featuring the chair in many of his buildings, such as the Weissenhof Estate in Stuttgart in 1927.

Your Home Needs This #05: Thonet's bentwood chairs
A bit of contrast again a pale neutral background via Entrance
Your Home Needs This #05: Thonet's bentwood chairs
Modern meets vintage via trendenser

Thonet’s original 1859 design was conceived without armrests, it was only later when his sons took over the company following his death in 1871 that a single piece of solid beech wood was used to create the cocooning backrest and armrest. Both are still classics, more than 160 years later, which you can’t say for many pieces of furniture today. Their smooth, elegant curves look right at home in the most minimalist of interiors, as well as with cane work seats in cosier, more eclectic spaces. I think they look especially good with Saarinen’s tulip table, that I adore and have written about many times before. One of these beauties is definitely on my forever home wishlist…

Your Home Needs This #05: Thonet's bentwood chairs
A bentwood chair used as a bedside stand via Fantastic Frank
Your Home Needs This #05: Thonet's bentwood chairs
Used here in a monochrome scheme via hannas inspo
Your Home Needs This #05: Thonet's bentwood chairs
Light and calm via Stil Inspiration
Your Home Needs This #05: Thonet's bentwood chairs
Paired with a Saarinen-style tulip table via Avenue Lifestyle
Your Home Needs This #05: Thonet's bentwood chairs
Two chairs just waiting to be sat in, don’t they look like they’re in conversation with one another? via Fantastic Frank

What do you think? Would you have a bentwood chair in your home?