Items27The creator’s order
  1. 1Michael ThonetMichael ThonetBorn 2 Jul 1796Thonet'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…0i
  2. 2Gustav StickleyGustav StickleyBorn 9 Mar 1858Stickley'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…0i
  3. 3Lucian ErcolaniLucian ErcolaniErcolani 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…0
  4. 4Kaare KlintKaare KlintBorn 15 Dec 1888Klint 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…0i
  5. 5Gio PontiGio PontiBorn 18 Nov 1891Ponti 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…0i
  6. 6Alvar AaltoAlvar AaltoBorn 3 Feb 1898Stool 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…0i
  7. 7Jean ProuvéJean ProuvéA 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…0i
  8. 8Arne JacobsenArne JacobsenBorn 11 Feb 1902Jacobsen'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…0i
  9. 9Marcel BreuerMarcel BreuerBorn 21 May 1902As 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…0i
  10. 10Charlotte PerriandCharlotte PerriandBorn 24 Oct 1903Perriand 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…0i