chairs

The perpetual design question came up again a few weeks ago while visiting Vitra's Joe Colombo exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery... why are designers obsessed with chairs?

I used to work at Design Museum in London where on every desk, without fail, a copy of 1000 Chairs could be found and conversation regularly revolved around our Chair Alley exhibition, and who was doing what with chairs right now, or the pros and cons of steam-bent plywood or tubular steel versus moulded plastics or compressed cardboard layers...

The obsession has stayed with me, which I love, but it does make it so very difficult for me when the time comes to buy a new chair. It takes me a good 6-12 months of researching every possible shop, boutique, website, antiques sale, warehouse... until I find the PERFECT chair - of course there is no such thing and really its just the chair that comes closest until I can find a better one!

So for the past year I've been looking for a chair which I can use to work from at my desk, and sew from at the sewing machine. or one for each purpose - two chairs are of course always better than one.

So - here's a round up of some of my favourites so far - a few completely unsuitable but just too gorgeous to take off the list just yet...