The Chair: The Universal Object That Tells the Story of Design

3 October 2025

The chair is indispensable in design: it’s easy to see this when you consider all the contexts and situations in which this piece of furniture plays a central role and makes a difference. In the kitchen for a quick and intimate breakfast, at the dining table with family and guests, in the bedroom as a convenient support. But also in a restaurant or in the waiting room of a professional office, and even in church.

The chair truly accompanies life’s most important moments, welcoming pauses that can be meditative or convivial. Precisely because of its centrality, it has been a space for formal and material experimentation over the centuries, without ever losing its functional core but rather amplifying it through a growing focus on ergonomics and practicality. For the same reasons, it’s always a good idea to take the time to choose the right chair for each situation, looking at new developments but also at the icons that have marked the evolution of this crucial piece of furniture over time.

The history of the chair dates back a long way: hieroglyphics and archaeological finds unearthed in Egypt tell the story. In the West, the chair appeared as early as the classical era, continuing through the Middle Ages and up to the Renaissance, when it was no longer the preserve of a select few but began to spread more and more. During this period, the specific architectural styles of each geographical area began to emerge, with the Italian, French, and English schools, which the entire world looked to. However, it is to the early 20th century that we owe the concept of the chair, which remains a point of reference today, and it was precisely in the 20th century that this piece of furniture became the object of experimentation and innovation in form, function, and production.

A chair that can be considered a watershed between ancient and modern is undoubtedly the Chiavarina, designed in 1807 by Giuseppe Gaetano Descalzi, a carpenter from Chiavari who first codified the chair’s design in a drawing that is still in production today and which, as we will see, would become the model for some of the most iconic chairs of the 20th century.

Another key milestone in the evolution of this piece of furniture was marked in Austria, where Michael Thonet, starting in 1818, worked on the wood bending that would later give rise to the legendary No. 14, today produced by Gebrüder Thonet Vienna, a subsidiary of the original.

And it is another subsidiary of Michael Thonet, Thonet, that is responsible for a further step in the chair’s evolution, resulting in the Cantilever, designed by Marcel Breuer in 1929, also drawing on the designs of Dutch architect Mart Stam. In the spirit of evolution, Thonet asked designer Jil Sander to revisit the chair, and the result, recently unveiled, is a naturally elegant and glamorous version.

In the second half of the 20th century, chair design became a time of material experimentation. It’s no coincidence that in 1952, Charles and Ray Eames developed the first plastic shell for what is still called the Plastic Chair, produced by Vitra today.

Along similar lines, Eero Saarinen designed the Tulip Chair in 1957, produced by Knoll, the first chair ever to have a single central leg instead of the traditional four. Meanwhile, the Panton Chair, designed by Verner Panton in 1967 and still produced by Vitra, is an evolution of the Cantilever Chair.

Innovation does not forget history, and the Chiavarina itself inspired Gio Ponti‘s Superleggera in 1957: a simple and elegant chair, still produced by Cassina today and among the most sought-after thanks to its formal and functional versatility. Some fifty years later, in 2002, Philippe Starck took another “back to the future” with the revolutionary Louis Ghost chair for Kartell: it is the ghost of Louis XV and his style, interpreted in a contemporary key in transparent polycarbonate.

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