N° 14 SIDE CHAIR, 1859 BY MICHAEL THONET

Andrew Wallace, from Andrew Wallace Architects, an architect and interior designer from Liverpool went to an exhibition and saw the work of Michael Thonet..

Also known as the café or Vienna coffee house chaire, Michael Thonet’s N°14 Design was one on the first pieces of furniture to be manufactured on an industrial scale.
Thonet wanted to reduce manufacturing costs by making as many chairs as possible from the fewest number of parts. Like modern flat-pack furniture, the individual components for this chair could be loaded into crates for ease of shipping, before being put together their final destination. By the early 1900s Thonet was producing over a million chair’s a year.

Liverpool architects and achitects elsewhere in the UK may be interested to go to this exhibition.