Blue Thonet no 107 by Robert Stadler
Thonet says:
A Comfortable and Resilient Wooden Chair for Restaurants, Bistros and Private Dining Areas
It’s a feast for the eyes: the 107 chair is particularly suited for use in restaurants and cafés, thanks to an excellent combination of elegance, stability and lightness. With its simple form, it also lends itself perfectly for use as a dining table chair in the home.
With the 107 chair, designer Robert Stadler continues Thonet’s successful café and bistro furniture tradition. This wooden chair with its elegant form and comfortable feel is almost completely machine-produced, easy to clean and sturdy. Fulfilling both a constructional and aesthetic function, the offset backrest is a particularly striking feature.
Frame solid wood, without armrests, seat and backrest moulded plywood natural or stained beech. Wooden seats or upholstered with leather or fabric. With gliders for hard and soft floors.
Chair 1O7
A new bistro chair for Thonet / 2O11
To design a new bistro chair for Thonet is a touchy task. Initially I was proposed to customize a typical Thonet chair for the Corso restaurants, the design of which I am in charge of. 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 renewed for being the first having achieved a world wide distribution of their furniture thanks to it’s ingenious conception based on dismantling. Yet, after more than 4O millions sold chairs the manufacturing of the back is still rather traditional. With chair 1O7 I focused on a new design of that element which is now being produced in an almost totally automated process.
I Dear say:
I do love other work by Robert Stadler, but this is a mis design. Hardly any curve as per the original Thonet café chairs. No remembrance of the innovative steam bending as bending seems hardly necessary for this chair. No I’ve hold off for a long time to share this chair, but in my striving to be as complete as possible here I have to share it with you, but not without my view.
On the other hand I would like to point you (and Robert and Thonet) to the chairs of Hendrik Petrus Berlage who, probably influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright (see for instance his High Back Chair), advocated a lack of curves and introduced a back load baring construction as in the Egyptian Chair: The load baring is not in the connection between the back and the seat, but on another part of the seat, or lower in the back.
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