Hasta La Ideas

Austrian designer Robert Stadler has created a new bistro chair for Thonet, a brand famed for their bentwood chairs synonymous with cafe culture that have hardly changed in a hundred years.

Stadler’s Chair 107 borrows the language of the original but incorporates a flat backrest and can be produced in a process that’s almost entirely automated.

Stadler designed the chair for the interior of a restaurant for the Corso brand in Paris – see his restaurant interior on Avenue Trudaine here and the one on Place Franz Liszt here.

The original Thonet cafe chairs were designed in 1859, produced in their millions and distributed worldwide.

Yesterday we published a movie in which American furniture designer Matthias Pliessnig wraps a Thonet chair with strips of steam-bent white oak to create a sculpture – watch it on Dezeen Screen.

Photographs are by Constantin Meyer and Charles Negre.

The details below are from Stadler:

To design a new bistrot chair for Thonet is a touchy task. Initially I was proposed to customize a typical Thonet chair for the Corso restaurants, for which I am in charge of the design.

But I preferred to elaborate a new chair instead of producing one more Designer comment on this essential piece of furniture. My starting point was the fact that today chair 214 (historically baptized Nr. 14) is rather expensive, which represents a certain break in regards to Thonet’s history.

Indeed the company is renowned for being the first to achieve a world-wide distribution of their furniture thanks to it’s ingenious conception based on dismantling.

Yet, after more than 40 million sold chairs the manufacturing of the back part is still rather traditional.

With chair 107 I focussed on a new design of that element which is now being produced in an almost totally automatic process.