The bistro chair from Thonet is shrouded in mythology that attests to its ubiquity and durability. (The No. 14 is rumored to have survived a fall from the Eiffel Tower in 1889 unscathed.) Thonet’s chairs proliferated in lockstep with 19th-and 20th-century European urban development.
Courtesy Historic Images/Alamy Stock Photo
There’s a certain category of chair that lacks a proper name. Mass-produced, globally distributed, and often conceived without a designer, today it dominates our streetscapes, commercial interiors, and increasingly the domestic environment. It is often referred to as a “café chair,” but that name belies a far more complex reality: Its very existence is a testament to upheavals in production, urban development, and society that have shaped the past two centuries. Nestled within this history is also a parable about the challenges of designing for the many versus designing for the few.
Thonet pioneered the café chair; the company’s savvy business strategies and simple constructions would set the model for others to follow. The beginning was modest: Two hundred years ago, in the small Prussian town of Boppard, cabinetmaker Michael Thonet set up a small workshop where he used traditional carving and joinery. He soon became singularly obsessed with simplifying the means of production—making furniture cheaper, quicker to produce, and en masse. For the next 40 years, he worked to meet these ends, devising ways of bending solid wood by boiling it in glue and using metal braces to prevent splitting and tearing. That allowed him to shape wood into complex curves and reduce his chairs to the smallest number of components.
Thonet’s two most successful chairs—No. 14 and No. 18—were also its simplest and most affordable. Throughout the 1860s, Thonet established sales branches in major European capitals, including Paris, London, Prague, and Berlin, plus other regional centers. Catalogs were printed in at least four languages, and by 1875, five factories were producing 620,000 chairs in total per year. To make distribution easier, chairs could be shipped in parts and assembled locally, preceding IKEA’s flat-packing method by a century. They were the first chairs designed truly for the masses.
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But Thonet’s success wasn’t just about harnessing the power of mass production. The emergence of the café chair was a response to the changing nature and uses of the public sphere. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the coffeehouse had become an important new type of public space, a novel form of engagement where strangers were meant to interact in debate. Typical coffeehouses were furnished accordingly, with long communal tables and benches; chairs were relatively rare. By the 19th century, however, such interactions were anathema; cities had become a relentless flurry of sensory overload. Seeking a countermeasure, people craved places to retreat, and cafés were now a way to be alone in public—to stare at crowds with cool detachment and lose oneself in thought or in the company of close friends. To do so, a cheap, lightweight, and unobtrusive chair like No. 14 was ideal; it was a tool for anonymity.