Furniture Designers Whose Ideas Still Feel Useful

Thonet's No. 14 café chair of 1859 is the prototype of flat-pack furniture: six pieces of steam-bent beech, ten screws and two nuts, shipped 36 to a crate and assembled at the café. Bending solid wood in iron moulds let semi-skilled factory workers produce it at scale, and tens of millions were made. Practically, it is light, strong, stackable in a pinch and easy to repair, though its narrow round seat suits a coffee more than a long dinner. Thonet's sons ran the factories in Moravia that made it the café chair of Europe.

Stickley's Craftsman furniture, made in his workshops near Syracuse, New York, from around 1900, is honest to the point of bluntness: quarter-sawn white oak, square legs, exposed mortise-and-tenon joints and leather seats, built to outlast the family that bought it. His magazine The Craftsman sold the idea of a simple, well-made home to the American middle class, along with house plans to put the furniture in. It is heavy and not cheap, but it ages beautifully, and the Morris-style reclining armchair with its adjustable back is still one of the comfiest reading chairs going.

Ercolani founded Ercol in High Wycombe and, after winning a wartime contract for 100,000 cheap utility chairs, worked out how to bend and machine-turn elm and beech for mass production of the traditional Windsor chair. The result, from the late 1940s, was light, sturdy, affordable kitchen and dining furniture: stick-back chairs, nests of tables and the stacking Butterfly chair. It suits small British homes, scuffs gracefully and is easy to find second-hand, which is part of why it never went away. The company still makes many of his designs.

Klint measured people and their belongings before he designed anything: how much cupboard space a set of shirts, plates or cutlery actually needs, and the proportions of the human body at rest. That research, carried out with students at the Royal Danish Academy's furniture school he founded in 1924, is the foundation of Danish modern. His Safari chair of 1933, based on a British campaign chair, packs flat without tools, and the folding Propeller stool shows the same economy. Many later Danish masters, Børge Mogensen among them, were his students.

Ponti took the traditional rush-seated chair made by fishermen's families in Chiavari, on the Ligurian coast, and refined it until it was almost weightless. His Superleggera of 1957, made by Cassina, weighs about 1.7 kilograms, light enough to lift with one finger, yet the ash frame with its slim triangular legs is strong enough that Cassina's publicity showed it thrown from a fourth-floor window. It is a superb dining chair for small rooms, easy to move and to sit on for hours. Ponti also founded Domus magazine, which spread these ideas worldwide.

Stool 60, launched in 1933, may be the most useful object on this list: three birch legs bent into an L at the top using a technique Aalto developed with the cabinetmaker Otto Korhonen, screwed directly under a round seat, so the stools stack in a neat spiral and serve as seats, side tables or plant stands. It is cheap, light and nearly indestructible. The Paimio chair, a bent-plywood seat designed for tuberculosis patients to breathe easily, shows his comfort research. He and his wife Aino Aalto co-founded Artek in 1935 to sell the furniture.

A metalworker by training, Prouvé designed furniture the way engineers design bridges: thick where the load falls, thin where it does not. His Standard chair of the 1930s has slim front legs of bent tubular steel and broad, tapering back legs of folded sheet steel, because that is where a sitter's weight goes when they lean back. His Nancy workshop made school desks, university furniture and office chairs that survived decades of hard use. Vitra now reissues many designs, and his metal-and-oak pieces are a lesson in why structure can be beautiful.

Jacobsen's Ant chair of 1952 and Series 7 chair of 1955 solved a problem every canteen and conference room has: a light, stackable chair that is comfortable for an hour. A single sheet of moulded plywood, pinched at the waist so it flexes, sits on slim steel legs; Fritz Hansen has sold millions of them, in every colour. His Egg and Swan chairs, designed for the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen, where he planned everything down to the cutlery, are the luxury end. Honest caveat: Series 7 seats are hard without a cushion over a long dinner.

As a young master at the Bauhaus, Breuer was inspired by the handlebars of his bicycle to bend seamless steel tube into furniture. The Wassily armchair of 1925 and especially the cantilevered Cesca chair of 1928, with its cane seat on a single looping tube, brought light, cheap-to-make, easily cleaned furniture into kitchens, cafés and offices worldwide; the Cesca's springy cantilever is still a comfortable dining chair. The cantilever idea was shared with Mart Stam and Mies van der Rohe, and the first tubular pieces were made with the Mannesmann steel company's tubing.

Perriand was the furniture brain of Le Corbusier's studio from 1927: the LC4 chaise longue, the swivel chair and the Grand Confort armchairs long credited to him alone were designed with her and his cousin Pierre Jeanneret. Later, in Japan and the French Alps, she turned to wood and storage, and her modular shelving with coloured sliding panels and her compact kitchens for the ski resort of Les Arcs are still models for small homes. Her free-form tables and simple straw-seated chairs show a designer thinking about how people actually live.

Nakashima let the tree decide. His tables keep the natural, uneven edge of a slab of walnut, with cracks held together by butterfly-shaped wooden keys, so each one records the life of a particular tree. He learned traditional Japanese joinery from a carpenter, Gentaro Hikogawa, while both were interned in a camp in Idaho during the Second World War, then built his workshop in New Hope, Pennsylvania, where his daughter Mira Nakashima continues it. His Conoid chair, cantilevered on two runners, is sturdier than it looks. Expensive now, but made to last centuries.

This entry belongs equally to Ray Eames: the office Charles ran with his wife from 1941 was a true partnership, and her eye for colour, form and display shaped every piece. Their moulded plywood chairs of 1946 grew from splints they developed for the US Navy, and their fibreglass shell chairs of 1950, later remade in polypropylene, gave schools, airports and kitchens a cheap, comfortable seat on interchangeable bases. Herman Miller and Vitra still produce them. The Eames Lounge Chair of 1956 is the indulgent version, beautifully comfortable and priced to match.

Saarinen wanted to clear up what he called the slum of legs under tables and chairs. His Tulip chair and table of 1957, made by Knoll, stand on a single flared pedestal, so a small kitchen or café table can seat more people with nothing to knock your knees on; the round marble-topped table remains one of the most practical dining tables for a tight space. The chair's base is actually cast aluminium painted to match the fibreglass shell, a compromise he disliked. His Womb chair, made at Florence Knoll's request for curling up in, shows the softer side.

A trained cabinetmaker who designed around 500 chairs, Wegner is the best guide to how wood can be shaped for the body. The Wishbone chair of 1949, made by Carl Hansen & Søn ever since, uses a steam-bent top rail that wraps around the sitter, a Y-shaped back splat for support and a seat woven by hand from about 120 metres of paper cord, which takes a skilled weaver around an hour. It is light, comfortable for long meals and repairable. His Round Chair was called simply the Chair by American critics after the 1960 Kennedy–Nixon television debate.

Mogensen designed for ordinary Danish families rather than collectors. As head of design for the FDB co-operative's furniture arm from 1942 he produced simple, cheap beech and pine pieces such as the J39 People's Chair, with a woven paper-cord seat, which is still in production and still an excellent kitchen chair. Later, with the manufacturer Fredericia, came the low, deep Spanish Chair with its wide leather armrests for resting a cup. His modular Boligens Byggeskabe storage system, developed with the architect Grethe Meyer, was sized, as his teacher Kaare Klint taught, to what people actually keep.

If you went to a British school, you have almost certainly sat on Day's Polyprop chair. Launched by Hille in 1963, it was the first chair with a seat shell injection-moulded from polypropylene, a new, cheap and nearly unbreakable plastic, on a stackable steel base; tens of millions have been sold, in halls, canteens and waiting rooms worldwide. It is not luxurious, but it is light, washable, stackable and surprisingly comfortable. Day also designed seating for the Royal Festival Hall and the Barbican, and often worked alongside his wife, the textile designer Lucienne Day.

Yanagi's Butterfly stool of 1954 is two identical pieces of moulded plywood joined back to back by a single brass rod and a couple of screws, so its shape, like a pair of wings or a torii gate, comes straight from the manufacturing method. Made since then by Tendo Mokko, it is small enough for a genkan or a bedside and stable despite looking fragile. Yanagi worked by hand-making full-size models rather than drawing, and his father was Yanagi Sōetsu, founder of the mingei folk-craft movement, whose respect for anonymous useful objects runs through everything he made.

Florence Knoll invented the modern office interior. Through the Knoll Planning Unit she pioneered space planning with fabric and colour swatches pasted on boards, and she designed the quiet, rectilinear sofas, credenzas and desks, which she modestly called the meat and potatoes, that let star pieces by Saarinen and Mies stand out. Her clean lounge seating and storage still look right in a home office. She also ran the company after her husband Hans Knoll's death in 1955 and persuaded designers, including Bertoia and Saarinen, to work for it.

Castiglioni, who usually worked with his brother Pier Giacomo, loved readymade parts and witty solutions. The Mezzadro stool of 1957 is a tractor seat on a bent steel spring with a wooden footrest, and it is genuinely comfortable to perch on; the Sella stool, a bicycle saddle on a wobbling pole, was designed for standing at the phone. Their Arco floor lamp of 1962, with a marble base and a long steel arc, brings light over a dining table without a ceiling fitting, a solution for rented flats that still sells. His studio in Milan is now a museum.

The Panton Chair was the first single-piece cantilevered plastic chair: one S-shaped sweep of material with no legs, joints or screws. Panton sketched it in the 1950s, but it took years of work with Vitra's founder Willi Fehlbaum and his team to find a plastic and moulding process strong enough, and it went on sale in 1967. Modern versions in polypropylene stack, survive outdoors and come in bold colours. It is more comfortable than it looks for short sits, less so for a long dinner, and still the boldest way to brighten a kitchen.

Lundgren was IKEA's fourth employee, and the legend is that while loading a table into a car for a photo shoot in the 1950s he took the legs off to make it fit, which helped set the company on flat packs. He designed hundreds of IKEA pieces, including the Lövet table and, most famously, the Billy bookcase of 1979, sketched on a napkin and since sold in tens of millions. Billy is not heirloom furniture, but it is cheap, adaptable and easy to move, and it shaped how a generation stores books. Credit for flat-pack belongs to the company's whole team too.

Mari's Autoprogettazione of 1974 gave away instructions for 19 pieces of furniture, tables, chairs, beds and shelves, that anyone could build from standard planks and nails with a hammer, so people would understand how furniture works and stop paying for styling. Readers built them in kitchens and community workshops worldwide, and Artek now sells a kit version while the drawings circulate freely. The chairs are basic and the joints honest rather than refined, which is the point. His Danese desk objects and calendars show the same rigour in production design.

Kuramata is the poetic counterweight on this list: his pieces question furniture's weight and solidity. The Glass Chair of 1976 is six panes of glass bonded with a new adhesive and no frame at all; How High the Moon of 1986 is an armchair made entirely of expanded steel mesh, as see-through as a drawing; Miss Blanche sets paper roses floating in clear acrylic. They are not everyday practical, but his drawer cabinets on wheels and curving chests of drawers, made with skilled Tokyo fabricators, are genuinely useful storage with a sense of humour.

Pesce's Up series of 1969, made with C&B Italia, used polyurethane foam that was vacuum-compressed into a flat pack and then swelled to full size when the buyer opened the box: a deliberately theatrical take on flat-pack. The Up5 armchair and its ball footstool, shaped like a woman tethered to a ball and chain, are also a statement about women's confinement. Later he championed resin pieces poured so each came out slightly different, arguing industry could make variety, not sameness. The Up chair is still in production, and very comfortable.