Know Your Chairs: The Louis Ghost Chair

For this episode of Know Your Chairs, I am featuring a delightful, tongue-in-cheek piece of furniture by the legendary Philippe Starck.

A man of many talents, Starck's career has bounced around the design world, from commercial (restaurants and hotels) design to residential design to product design to architecture--even naval design. He started his career in 1969. He was named artistic director of Pierre Cardin's publishing house, he opened his own industrial design company Starck Product, and in 1983, he designed the private rooms of President François Mitterrand at the Élysée Palace in Paris.

With former Studio 54 owner and hotelier extraordinaire Ian Schrager, Starck pioneered the idea of the boutique hotel by creating The Royalton in New York City. Starck went on to design a slew of unique hotels, each a true work of art, like The Paramount and The Hudson.Starck also worked successfully in the world of product design. In addition to mineral-water bottles for Glacier, watches for Fossil, and luggage for Samsonite, he created the iconic Juicy Salif citrus squeezer (it looks like an alien pod from "War of the Worlds") for Italian houseware brand Alessi.

But I think Starck is best known for designing hundreds and hundreds of pieces of furniture and lighting, and the best known of those pieces must be his reinvention of a classic Louis XVI chair, named the Louis Ghost chair for Kartell. The classic incarnation is clear acrylic (the see-through quality gives it its name) but it also comes in tinted colors and opaque black as well.

"I didn't really have to design the 'Louis Ghost' chair, because it is part of our western shared memory. It basically designed itself. Itʼs a ʻLouis somethingʼ, we donʼt know what, but everyone recognises it and it looks familiar. Itʼs here when you want to see it, and you can mix it if you want to be discrete. Itʼs on the verge of disappearing, dematerialising. Like everything that is produced by our civilisation."
--Philippe Starck

The armless version is called The Victoria Ghost Chair.

The chairs can be purchased through Design Within Reach here and here. But please beware of inexpensive knock offs and fake versions--not only does it violate the copyright and license holder of the design, but you will be buying something of inferior quality and workmanship that will likely snap or break.

Happy designing!

STUA at The Stahl

Hot on the heels of last week's post about the iconic Mid-Century Modern home The Stahl House, here is Spanish furniture manufacturer STUA's special line of furniture they created with Design Within Reach...and photographed in The Stahl House itself!

STUA furnishings at The Stahl House

The STUA Costura sofa and Solapa and Marea tables in the living area

The STUA Laclasica dining chair in a black finish

Left, the Deneb table and benches, Onda stools at the bar, and the Globus chair at the rear

The STUA Globus chair and the Deneb table and benches

The STUA Deneb table and benches

The STUA Gas swivel chair with black leather back and seat

The STUA Marea side table

Happy designing!

Mid-Century Modern March: Isamu Noguchi Cocktail Table

Isamu Nogchi was a multi-disciplinary Modernist master. Born in Los Angeles in 1904 to a Japanese father and white mother, Noguchi grew up in Japan until he was 13. During these formative years, he must have absorbed the respect and love of craft and form. He studied art and sculpture (with Constantin Brâncuși among others!) and created a vast body of work ranging from environmental design and sculptural gardens to product design to children's playgrounds to furniture design to sets for choreographers Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, and George Balanchine, and composer John Cage. “Everything is sculpture,” Noguchi said. “Any material, any idea without hindrance born into space, I consider sculpture.”

In 1947, he began working for Herman Miller and a year later, created his iconic cocktail (or coffee) table of two identical curved wood pieces and a glass top. Breathtaking in its simplicity, the biomorphic shape is truly a piece of sculpture for the home.

The table is available through Design Within Reach, here.
Visit the Noguchi website for more information about the sculptor and visiting the Noguchi Museum.
http://www.noguchi.org/

Happy designing!