The Thonet chair No. 14 – the café chair that conquered the world

The Thonet chair, chair No. 14, is a chair of steam-bent beech launched by Michael Thonet's firm in Vienna in 1859. It consisted of six wooden parts, ten screws and two nuts, could be shipped disassembled and put together on site, and became one of the first truly industrially mass-produced pieces of furniture. It remains a symbol of cafés all over the world.

Facts

The cabinet-maker from Boppard

Michael Thonet was born in 1796 in Boppard on the Rhine and was a cabinet-maker. From the 1830s he experimented with bending wood: first he glued thin veneers in layers that were shaped, later he learnt to bend solid wood. In 1842 he was invited to Vienna by Prince Metternich, who had seen his furniture, and there he continued his work.

In 1849 he started his own workshop in Vienna, and in 1853 his sons took over the business under the name Gebrüder Thonet. In 1856 the firm received a patent for bending solid wood in series production. The factories were located in Moravia, where there was plenty of beech forest.

How bentwood works

The technique is based on the fact that wood becomes pliable when heated with steam. The turned beech rods were steamed and then clamped against a metal strap and bent around a form, where they were left to dry. The strap prevented the fibres on the outside of the wood from splitting. Once dry, the wood kept its new shape.

The method made it possible to replace many joined parts with a few long, bent rods. Fewer parts meant fewer joints that could come loose, less handwork and a lower price. It was an early example of how a manufacturing method could determine the form of a piece of furniture.

Chair No. 14

Chair No. 14 of 1859 is the best known of the firm's many models. The back legs and the outer loop of the back are a single long bent rod, the inner loop of the back another, and the seat ring, the two front legs and the leg ring are the remaining parts. Everything is held together with screws. The seat was often woven of cane, so that the chair was light and airy.

Disassembled chairs could be packed tightly and shipped all over the world to be screwed together on site. It is often said that 36 chairs fitted into one cubic metre. The chair became standard in the cafés of Vienna and then in Paris, Berlin and far beyond Europe, and it has been made in tens of millions.

A model for modernism

Modernist architects admired Thonet's chairs for their simplicity and honest construction. Le Corbusier used a Thonet chair in his pavilion at the Paris exhibition of 1925, and he praised it for its elegance and for being made with such precision and simplicity.

The Thonet firm later also manufactured tubular steel furniture after designs by Marcel Breuer and other Bauhaus designers, such as the Wassily chair. In this way a line runs from bent wood to bent steel tube. Read more in the guide to the Bauhaus.

Recognising a Thonet chair

A genuine older Thonet chair often has a stamp or label under the seat with the firm's name, and the bends are even and clean. Many other factories in Austria-Hungary and later all over Europe made similar bentwood chairs, so not every chair of this type is a Thonet. Swedish and Finnish factories also made their own versions.

Chair No. 14 shows, like the Windsor chair and the Shaker chair, how a simple chair can become timeless. Compare also with the art section's page on chair No. 14, and read more about the period under industrialisation and in the guide to furniture styles in chronological order.

How to recognise it

Exercise

Why could the Thonet chair be shipped cheaply all over the world?