NO 14 SIDE CHAIR, 1859
DESIGNED BY MICHAEL THONET MANUFACTURED BY GEBRUDER THONET
Andrew Wallace, from Andrew Wallace Architects, an architect and interior designer from Liverpool went to an exhibition in London, about Michael Thonet
Also know as the café or Vienna coffee house chair, Michael Thonet’s.
No 14 design was one of 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 component for this chair could be loaded into crates for ease of shipping, before being put together at their final destination. By the early 1900s Thonet was producing over a million chairs a year
Liverpool architects and achitects elsewhere in the UK may be interested to see this exhibition.