ELLE DECOR’s edit of the seats that changed the course of design history.
No design element is more universal than the chair. While its basic body-supporting functionality has hardly changed, the chair has seen countless interpretations that encompass ever-changing tastes and evolving materials, technologies, and ideologies. All of which has made this practical domestic necessity, at its best, an emblem of status, style, and artistry. Tulip Accent Chair
“The chair is among the most designed, studied, written about, and celebrated artifacts of the modern era,” design historian Peter Fiell tells ELLE DECOR. And no wonder, when it offers insight into what makes us tick. “If you study the history of the chair, you rediscover the world,” Stine Liv Buur, manager of the classics collection at Vitra, explains. “From existing chairs, both from our contemporary times but also thousands-of-years-old chairs, we can learn about comfort, ergonomics, quality, material, functionality, connections, dimensions, and not least, sustainability.”
As for what makes a good chair, Liv Buur deems that a successful build is “a comfortable seat that lives up to its function and is sustainable within material, connections, and longevity.” Fiell adds that beyond such considerations—a truly great chair fundamentally offers a special connection with its user. “It can be a physical, psychological, structural, intellectual, contextual, ideological, emotional, aesthetic, cultural, or even a spiritual connection,” Fiell explains.
Of course, for every really good chair, there are myriad failed attempts that have paved the way. Among such iterations, certain perches have forged their own path beyond the derivative and act as testaments to enduring design and remarkable ingenuity. Whether it’s a revolutionary design like Michael Thonet’s totemic bentwood armchair or Le Corbusier’s machine age Grand Confort LC2 armchair, the sculptural tulip chair or the world’s first totally transparent polycarbonate chair, each furnishing deserves a seat in the hall of design fame.
And while such tasteful design objects are worthy of being savored as museum-worthy specimens, they were also intended to support everyday life. So, by all means, appreciate them from afar or bring one into your home to be used as it was intended. Read on for the 20 chair designs we believe are worth knowing—and, if you’re feeling inspired, owning. So draw up a chair, and don’t sit this one out.
The bentwood chair, also known as the Thonet 209, not only deserves a place in the history books for its popularity as the quintessential restaurant chair, but also because it emerged from one of the most significant innovations in the timeline of the modern chair. Created by Prussian-born cabinetmaker Michael Thonet, who was experimenting with new methods of bending solid wood with steam and molding it to shape with mechanical presses, this chair was originally designed for the Daum coffeehouse in Vienna. Thonet set up a furniture manufacturing company in Vienna with his five sons, where the chair is still in production today. “It is the biggest selling chair model of all time, with 50 million units sold by 1930,” Fiell explains. With its near-circular seat frame and its hoop splat back, the Thonet 209 armchair is the icon for modernists. Even Le Corbusier himself considered this the chair that best shares the aesthetic of his modern architecture, placing it in nearly all of his buildings.
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Behold the Wassily B3 Chair, the first successful cantilever chair that defied the four-legged standard. Fascinated by bicycle handlebars, Hungarian architect Marcel Breuer introduced the first chair made from tubular steel in 1925. While his cohorts, the Dutch architect Mart Stam and German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, were experimenting with the same materials and showed their designs in public first at the Die Wohnung exhibition, it was Breuer’s version—which had better proportions and was more hard-wearing and comfortable—that ultimately revolutionized furniture. The sculptural, abstract chair was a milestone in the history of modern furniture, offering a sitting experience in which one is suspended over the base, seemingly floating on air, with just two legs for support (and a comfortable bounce). Three years later, Breuer would introduce through Knoll the Cesca, a simplified version of the chair that features a cane seat. While the Wassily and Cesca chairs have become the holy grail for modern designers, their design is as surprising now as it was in its first years. The chairs can be found in the permanent collections of museums like MoMA and the V&A.
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Used as a deck chair at Eileen Gray’s famous villa E-1027 in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France, the Transat chair has become one of the architect’s most enduring pieces. It gets its name from “transatlantic,” referring to deck chairs commonly used on steamships. This style would be a recurring theme in Gray’s buildings, which often resembled houseboats ready to sail. Flaunting a sleek frame with complicated joinery and an adjustable headrest, the Transat chair evokes the effortless pairing of comfort and class—and emerged as a Gray icon when it was published in Badovici’s L’Architecture Vivante in 1929. A hand-laquered specimen saw a spot in the homes of Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé, and sold at auction in 2009 for a staggering $27.8 million—making it still the most expensive chair ever sold in the world.
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Designer: Charlotte Perriand, Le Corbusier, and Pierre Jeanneret
Now this is a chair that isn’t afraid to show its true self. Inspired by the boxy-looking gentleman’s club chairs of the 1920s, Charlotte Perriand and Pierre Jeanneret designed this chair as part of an architectural commission for Le Corbusier’s design practice in Paris. What made it special? The LC2 wears its bones on the exterior, flaunting a tubular steel exoskeleton that evokes the rationalized geometric forms and machine-age aesthetic of Le Corbusier’s architecture. Dubbed by Le Corbusier as the “cushion basket,” the Grand Confort LC2 is a clever way to contain cushions in an open frame—and an enduring icon of modernist style.
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Designers: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich
Some chairs fall short of their intended design statement. This one does not. A chair truly fit for royalty, the MR90 was designed by German-American architect Mies van der Rohe and his partner, tubular design pioneer Lilly Reich, to furnish the German pavilion that the King of Spain Alfonso XIII and his queen would visit for the 1929 International Exhibition in Barcelona (hence the chair’s nickname, the Barcelona). While van der Rohe and Reich subscribed fully to the modern “less is more” approach, they looked to historic models when designing the MR90. Its scissor-shaped X-frame design was adopted from the luxurious chairs of Imperial Rome and ancient Egypt. Their own interpretation featured chrome-plated steel and leather upholstery with button stitching. While it was never intended to be mass-produced, Knoll began manufacturing the chair in 1953 (Fiell tells us first-edition examples are incredibly rare), enhancing the original prototypes by reconfiguring the frame with seamless welded joints. The MR90 has since become one of the most sought-after chairs in the seating world and would launch more than a thousand copies and continue to appear in interiors today.
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Designer: Charles and Ray Eames
American designer couple Charles and Ray Eames spent years experimenting with new materials and furniture-making processes, ultimately developing a machine called the “Kazam! Machine” that could mold plywood sheets into compound forms that could then be bent. The famed LCW plywood chair is the result of this process, introduced in 1946 after a series of award-winning chairs designed for the Museum of Modern Art’s 1940 “Organic Design in Home Furnishings” exhibition. Curiously, the seat was inspired by the gentle curve of a potato chip, with its soft cradling form shaped to host a sitter of any size—a design feature that was way ahead of anything that was being produced in Europe in the 1940s, according to the late chair historian Judith Miller. “Ingeniously, the Eameses [also] used rubber discs called shock mounts to fix the back and seat to the lumbar support and base, making the chair more flexible as well as more comfortable—and creating one of the first examples of a responsive backrest in the history of furniture,” she writes in her book Chairs. Today, this elegant, stackable chair remains easy to mass-produce (and therefore affordable) and a longstanding testament to the Eameses’ ingenuity.
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Designer: Charles and Ray Eames
If the LCW is the workaday sedan of design, the Eames lounge chair and matching ottoman, No. 670 and 671, are the Rolls-Royce of 20th-century chairs. “Unlike most other chairs by Charles and Ray Eames, this one was aimed squarely at the luxury end of the market,” Fiell says. “It was and remains very expensive.” It’s one of the most instantly recognizable designs by the Eames duo—and for good reason. “Comfortable and puffy like an old-fashioned club sofa, it is the mid-20th-century answer to the Victorian daybed,” Miller writes. Best known for their efforts to create inexpensive furniture pieces that could be mass-produced easily, the Eames set is the husband-and-wife team’s take on luxury. “The couple’s genius lies in the fact that the chair and ottoman look equally appropriate in the executive office, a home study, or the family den,” Miller adds. It’s also the best example of the evolution of the lounge chair typology, Vitra’s Liv Buur explains. “Charles and Ray Eames studied the chesterfield and the English club chair, in an aim to design a chair with similar comfort but a more easy and contemporary appearance. They succeeded—big time—both in design and longevity.” The seat was released by Herman Miller in 1956 and has been produced by Vitra uninterrupted since it was designed. The first chairs introduced in the 1950s still exist today and continue to be one of the most collectible models of sexy (not to mention comfortable) midcentury design.
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Designer: Charles and Ray Eames
Quite possibly the most famous of all the chairs (Fiell says he considers these the most important series of chairs ever designed), Charles and Ray Eames’s DAR seat is an example of survival of the fittest. “The DAR is part of a greater group of chairs, the Eames Shell chairs, which were the first chair with a seat and backrest formed from a single plastic shell,” Liv Buur says. “It was a ground-breaking innovation developed by the Eameses to meet the needs of a changing society.” The DAR chair, which stands for Dining Armchair with Rod base, merges Paris-chic with classic ’50s style, incorporating a base that resembles the Eiffel Tower and a gracefully ergonomic sculptural shell. The piece was the first to succeed the idea of the chair as part of a greater system, conceived to offer a variety of interchangeable bases including a rocker with a rod base on wooden runners and a four-legged base in tubular steel. The design has been in production by Vitra since the late 1950s and has spurred countless copies.
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Fed up with seating options that offered comfort at the expense of style, pioneering midcentury modern architect and furniture designer Florence Knoll issued a challenge in 1948 to a family friend, rising design star Eero Saarinen, to create a cozy chair that she could curl up in. The Womb chair was the Finnish-American architect’s answer. The first piece of mass-produced furniture with an integrated seat shell made of fiber-reinforced plastic (thanks to the help of a boat builder in New Jersey who was experimenting with fiberglass and resin), this all-enveloping piece offers endless posture options and extra elbow room for a comfortable and stylish spot to snuggle in.
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Inspired by a painting of Danish merchants in Ming dynasty chairs in 1944, the Wishbone chair was drawn up exclusively for Carl Hansen & Søn in 1949. Also known as the Y chair, this specimen requires over 100 manufacturing steps to create the steam-bent top and minimal, wishbone-shaped back, including a handwoven seat that takes an hour and approximately 400 feet of paper cord to create. It’s worth it. Its elegant simplicity makes it a masterpiece of Scandinavian design and a mainstay in dining rooms and offices alike.
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Arne Jacobsen was already an esteemed architect when he designed this lightweight stacking chair for the factory canteen of the Danish pharmaceutical firm Novo Nordisk. It was the first chair to be made from a single piece of plywood, featuring a slightly curved seat that was designed with the body’s needs in mind. But in fact, the original three-legged piece was not an instant hit. In fact, it almost ended up being another one of Jacobsen’s prototypes as Novo ordered only 300 chairs. It was only in 1980 after Jacobsen’s death (he was adamant about the three legs) that a fourth leg was added and a variety of colors was offered. It flew off the shelves. This landmark design, produced by Fritz Hansen, became the basis for many other designs including the similarly constructed and massive selling 3107 chair from his Series 7 seating chair.
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Like so many innovations before it, the Egg chair was the result of a series of trials and errors. Jacobsen experimented with wire and plastic in his garage before he landed on this now-legendary piece of functional art. Originally produced in an apple red upholstery, the Egg chair was designed for the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen, part of a hotel that was designed down to every detail by Jacobsen and has become an enduring symbol of Danish modern style at its finest—and the Egg chair is its crown jewel. Composed of a steel frame that is covered in an upholstered foam shell, this large and voluptuous chair is adored for its ability to embrace the sitter in a swaddling embrace.
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Also crafted for the Radisson SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen by Arne Jacobsen in 1958, this pedestal lounge chair has also endured alongside its sister chair (the Egg chair). A similarly cocooning piece made of molded synthetic material on a steel-and-aluminum base that lets its sitters swivel on a 360-degree rotation, the Swan chair was a technological innovation in furniture design. And important to note, it had no straight lines. A sitter that easily adapts to lobbies, lounges, and homes across the world, the Swan chair is still in production today at Fritz Hansen.
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A new AP19 chair, creatively dubbed by a journalist the Papa Bear chair, by Hans J. Wegner retails for approximately $18,400. It’s no wonder, with its being a definite favorite among the nearly 500 chairs Wegner designed in his lifetime. With its tall back and side panels that extend for each arm (believed to have been created in England in the 1600s to help shield drafts), the wingback chair is the ultimate, gloriously comfy, lounge seat. Be right back, you can find us in this bear of a chair with a book in hand.
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In 1957, Eero Saarinen unveiled the now-famous Pedestal Collection, a series of chairs that are a solution to the “ugly, confusing, unrestful world” underneath tables and chairs. Among them, the Tulip chair stood out as a piece that eschewed the jumble of traditional chair legs with one sleek, tuliplike base. It was a chic, space-age model that looked good from every angle. “A supremely elegant design, the Tulip armchair was one of the first serious attempts at creating a single-material, single-form chair,” Fiell explains. “It couldn’t be done, and thus resulted in the marriage of a cast aluminum base with a plastic seat shell. While the design wasn’t structurally integrated, it was visually unified.” Knoll has produced the Tulip chair since 1957, making it a gigantic commercial success.
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Technological advances in the postwar years facilitated the production of what would become one of the largest industries in the world: plastic. “Verner Panton was captivated by the potential of plastic, a novel material in the 1950s,” Liv Buur explains. “His aim was to create a comfortable chair made in one piece that could be used anywhere.” Enter the Panton chair. This stackable seat—the first all-plastic chair made in one piece with a cantilever design—took over 10 years of research and development, as well as several years of searching for a manufacturer, before making its debut via Vitra in 1967. “The groundbreaking innovation was hailed as a sensation and received numerous prizes,” Liv Buur adds. “Today the recognizable organic shape of the Panton chair is an icon.”
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The Platner chair's seemingly effortless curvature never fooled anyone so well. Each chair requires the welds of up to 1,000 nickel-plated steel rods. A clever reinterpretation of the period Louis XV–style chair, the Platner chair, designed by American designer Warren Platner, is an elegant silhouette of a chair that doesn’t have to shout to be noticed. Bonus: It’s now available in an 18K-gold-plated finish that takes a glamorous icon to the next level—if at all possible.
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Throughout the 1960s, furniture designers were seeking an alternative to plastic and struggled to find anything that could compete with its light flexibility. Experimentation with cardboard was waning when, in the early ’70s, Canadian-born architect Frank Gehry started playing with a pile of corrugated cardboard that he saw on the street outside of his Los Angeles office. While other designers were using single pieces of cardboard reinforced with folds and slots, Gehry had the idea to glue the material together with alternating strips of corrugated cardboard, resulting in a sturdy, long-lasting material. He launched the Easy Edges furniture collection in 1972, and the Wiggle Side chair was its curvaceous centerpiece. The chair, like Gehry’s celebrated architecture, is characterized by its abstract, sculptural qualities—a construction technique previously considered truly inconceivable with this heavy paper-based material.
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Again, inspiration from the past serves as fodder for contemporary novelties. Conceived in 2002 by French architect Philippe Starck for Kartell, an Italian company known for its contemporary plastic furniture, the Louis Ghost chair is a fresh take on French regal elegance. “The technical experimentation that resulted in the advent of the see-through chair was a painstaking and difficult journey, involving highly intensive research,” Miller writes. “But, once resolved, it allowed Starck and the manufacturer Kartell to progress with more sophisticated forms.” The result is the world’s first line of totally transparent polycarbonate chairs. The Louis Ghost chair—one of the best selling chairs of the 21st century—flaunted a fitting marriage of old and new.
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Sometimes something is so beautiful that it doesn’t require the passing of time to be considered a classic. The Roly-Poly, designed by British designer Faye Toogood in 2014 after the birth of her first child, came out of a real need. She was pregnant and struggling to find a comfortable chair. Characterized by its chunky legs and soft edges, the Roly-Poly armchair is a low-profile, comfortable seat that many see as an homage to motherhood—if not the thick, stubby legs of a baby elephant. “It’s an interesting boldly sculptural single-form, single-material rotational-molded chair, which can be used indoors and outdoors,” Fielly notes. Originally cast in fiberglass, the chair now comes in an array of materials and colors that would appeal to maximalists and minimalists alike.
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Rachel Silva, the Assistant Digital Editor at ELLE DECOR, covers design, architecture, trends, and anything to do with haute couture. She has previously written for Time, The Wall Street Journal, and Citywire.
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