Chair Of The Week 14

I've been working on some new chair designs that I'm hoping to have finalized soon. When they are all done, I'll put them on here! But for now, here are some sketches I did a couple years ago when I was working at Ricchio Design.

I did a ton of mid-century style sketches for a project we were working on. It was so much fun! That is one of my very favorite design periods (if you haven't already noticed). My dream is to one day live in an Eichler-esque home surrounded by mid-century goodness.

Chair Of The Week 13

Yesterday I was flipping through some of my furniture catalogues from 2006. I was drawn to this simple and clean little chair from Artifort.

For some reason, as soon as I saw it, I was motivated to start drawing some chairs of my own. I even built up a 3D model. Now I'm thinking it would be fun to start putting some of my chair designs on here for an occasional chair of the week. You can look for them in the up coming weeks.

Chair Of The Week 12

I fell in love with the work of designer Hella Jongerius when I first saw her Polder Sofa for Vitra in 2005.

I visited the Vitra booth at Isaloni in 2006 and was happy to find more of her work. This week's chair is one that made me smile 4 years ago when I saw it in Italy.

The worker chair.

Image from Unica Home

Chair Of The Week 11

Tanya Aguiniga is a furniture designer/artist based in Los Angeles. Most of her furniture pieces incorporate fiber or textiles, making them appear fragile. The Zinacantan is just one example of this. Although it's shape is rigid, the yarn adds delicacy.

Chair Of The Week 10

The Thonet family is famous for pioneering bent steamed wood, in the 1830's. The results of these efforts are beautiful, practical pieces of furniture including the famous Chair 14.

And MANY other designs.

But here is a modern interpretation of the wood bending technique by Stefan Diez, titled 404.
Go to the website and click on the bottom image to sift through photos of the entire process. Very interesting!

images from chairblog.eu and Stefan Diez

Chair Of The Week 9

This week's chair was spotted on an Apartment Therapy post about a shipping container city in Mexico. The chairs in their "cover" photo caught my eye.

When I looked through the comments on that post I found out I wasn't the only one interested in those cool looking chairs. Fortunately for all of us, some people were able to identify them as Acapulco chairs.
They are very common in Mexico and only cost about $30, but in the states they are $300+!

I love that they can be woven with multi-colored cords.

I just had to share this sweet background image from the innit website.

images from container city, oficina kreativa and innitimported

Chair Of The Week 8 (part 1)

During my junior year in the Industrial Design program at Cal State Long Beach I took a furniture design class. Our professor Joe Ricchio (also, my former boss) arranged an excellent competition for the students. It was called Wilsonart Challenges, and was sponsored by Wilsonart Laminate. Grace Jeffers, who is extremely knowledgeable and passionate about laminate, traveled from New York to give us the project details and guide us through the process. She inspired us with an explanation of the company's history (including a story of how she saved this amazing house!), the many uses of laminate, the way it is manufactured and all of it's unique qualities.

Stardust Spectra Laminate

Project Brief: Design a chair that incorporates the use of laminate (as many or as few patterns as desired). Keep in mind that the winning chair will appear as a two page inside cover spread in popular design magazines. This means the chair design should be one that makes people want to keep looking.

Each student in our class designed an amazing chair! It was so fun to see all the variety. The chairs were judged by Grace and a few others, and the top 5 were displayed at the Wilsonart ICFF booth in New York.

Eric MacDonald's chair won first place. His inspiration was the shape of the sample chip itself. He ingeniously gave it dimension and rotated it, creating the seat and the back.


When I pull out my external hard drive I will do a sequel to this post, showing you the other chairs from our class.

Chair Of The Week 7 (Emeco at McDonalds?!)

On my trek back from California, I stopped to use the restroom in a McDonald's in St. George and was shocked to find that the restaurant was using Emeco's Navy Chair! With a price tag per chair of $415 and up, you can probably understand my surprise. To me, Emeco is a high class kinda design company, not one I would expect to have fast food restaurants using their chairs.


The original navy chair was designed for navy ships in WWII and could supposedly withstand a torpedo blast. Check out some fun videos of people 'testing' the strength of this chair by dropping it from a 6 story building, catapulting it and even shooting it with a rifle!



Here are some other discussions I found about McDonald's using modern designer chairs (and even some talk about them being knock-offs *gasp*)!

Egg Chair at a MD's in Europe.

NYC McDonald's gets a modern make-over.

A flickr group of Emeco chairs found on the streets.

Chair Of The Week 6

I received a funny text last week from my mom's good friend Ursula.

"Since you've been on vacation, I thought you could use a little help with your chair of the week."

And attached, I found the following picture:


HOLY COW! Can you believe this chair actually exists? Haha! Thanks Ursula, I really did need the help because I hadn't prepared anything for this week :)

Chair Of The Week 5

French designer Philippe Stark is well known for creating products, interiors and architecture with a unique flare. Recently Driade, an Italian manufacturer produced a new armchair by Stark. I'd love to sit in this polyethylene beauty.

Chair Of The Week 4

To me, the name Barbara Barry is synonymous with elegance and class. Her designs are flawless, inviting and breathtaking. Just take her Script side chair for McGuire Furniture for example...beautiful.



I had the good fortune of interviewing Ms. Barry for a school assignment. Needless to say, she is an inspiration. The advice I remember most is to be a "design machine"; always create and produce new ideas. Companies want someone who they know will never dry up.

Chair Of The Week 3 (and international searches)

Sometimes I like to search for things on other country's Google homepages. Lately Afghanistan has been on my mind because my brother in law is in the Marines there. So I decided to search for a chair on the Afghan Google. Here is a simple how-to so you can do your own international searches.

1. Decide what countries' Google homepage you want to use. Here are a few that have searched on before:

Italy - google.it
Czech Republic - google.cz
Germany - google.de
Iceland - google.is
and (as of today) Afghanistan - google.af

I usually just guess what the ending is, or I'll do a search for "Italy's Google". But make it easy on yourself and look here for a nice list.

I thought this one was funny. Arrrr. Um ok, back to chairs and doing international searches.

2. Decide what you want to search for and translate it into that country's native language.

3. Copy and paste the translation into the Google search bar and hit enter.

4. Examine results. I prefer to look at images because I can't understand the text! However, there is sometimes a translate option or you can always use this again.

I hope you have fun with this! I think it's a great way to search outside the box and find totally new things.

Now I have finally come to the chair of the week! This giant introduction may not be fitting of the chair I found. It is a very unusual one, not attractive in my opinion and very bird cage-esque. However, I finally present to you...

Ya I know, it's strange. But to make up for it, I'm going to give you TWO chairs this week! Now time to unveil the second...
A very luxurious Arabian style. It's kinda growing on me :)

Wow, I learned so much about Google while doing this post! It ended up being more about teaching a search method than presenting an awesome chair, but I think it was worth it. Now go experiment with those international searches!

Chair Of The Week 2

This week's chair is taking us back in time...to 1899. It's a gorgeous chair in the Art Nouveau style, designed by Édouard Colonna. Read more here.


I absolutely LOVE art nouveau. The art by Alphonse Mucha is breathtaking. Here are just a few examples.
Study for The Moon, 1902; Study for The North Star, 1902

Autumn

Chair Of The Week 1

Starting today I will be posting an awesome looking chair each week! I love love loooove chairs, and can't wait to find some that I have never seen before. So stay tuned for all sorts of sweet seats.

To get things rolling, here is a funky little chair from edra that has always amused me. I actually got to sit in this one at the Isaloni furniture show in Milan 2 years ago. Feels pretty good. Be sure to check out their site for some unbelievably creative furniture, Italian style (click on the 'eng' link for easier navigating).