At the invitation of the Crafts Council of New South Wales, Marc Newson designed his Wood Chair for its 1988 travelling exhibition 'The House of Fiction: Domestic Blueprints in Wood'. Until that point, Newson had little experience of working with wood. However, borrowing from traditional boatbuilding techniques, he proposed to steam-bend strips of solid wood into a simple, almost abstract double curve or alpha shape.
The high rejection rate for the solid wooden strips from coachwood and maple, which either broke during the steaming process or failed to hold their shape once removed from the mould, proved problematic. But Newson’s perseverance led him to the manufacturer James Bradley’s Pty in Tasmania, Australia, who resolved the production issues by using local pine. James Bradley’s Pty produced a small batch of these chairs before the Italian firm Cappellini took control of the production in 1992, making minor modifications, including changing the incline of the backrest and swapping Australian pine for beech.
Text: Libby Sellers
