the globe chair

there will be those among my readers who will recall the glory years of danish design when it was cooler than cool to own danish teak furniture. i myself owned a gorgeous teak student’s desk that i wish i had kept, but as with all things, it got sent to where it was needed. marimekko was a key player in the area of finnish design, providing gorgeous if not bold designs in material. i still have some that i bought from a very cool company called contemporary cloth who still have the odd bits and pieces of marimekko material, but you have to hunt through their site to find them. i should also mention that they (as a truly worthy company should) donate a percentage of their sales to help homeless people which i think is way cool. if you're interested in learning lots more about marimekko then be sure to pay a visit to marimekko story.com where the current drop-dead gorgeous marimekko lineup is on display!!!

another feature of those times was plastic furniture. high up on the list of those whose products were coveted was (and still is) eero aarnio. among the many enduring designs that aarnio brought into the world was the bubble chair (seen here with his daughters relaxing inside their very own bubble chairs) about which aarnio says: "after i had made the ball chair i wanted to have the light inside it and so i had the idea of a transparent ball where light comes from all directions. the only suitable material is acrylic which is heated and blown into shape like a soap bubble. since i knew that the dome-shaped skylights are made in this way i contacted the manufacturer and asked if it would be technically possible to blow a bubble that is bigger than a hemisphere. the answer was yes. i had a steel ring made, the bubble was blown and cushions were added and the chair was ready. and again the name was obvious: bubble."

the ball chair that aarnio referred to is my favourite of all of his designs. replicating the effect of a womb without the claustrophobic side-effects, the ball chair effectively isolates without isolating. here’s what aarnio had to say about this spectacular design: "the idea of the chair was very obvious. we had moved to our first home and i had started my free-lance career in 1962. we had a home but no proper big chair, so i decided to make one, but in some way a really new one.
after some drawing i noticed that the shape of the chair had become so simple that it was merely a ball. i pinned the full scale drawing on the wall and “sat” in the chair to see how my head would move when sitting inside it. being the taller one of us i “sat” in the chair and my wife drew the course of my head on the wall. this is how i determined the height of the chair. since i aimed at a ball shape, the other lines were easy to draw, just remembering that the chair would have to fit through a doorway.
after this i made the first prototype myself using an inside mould, which has been made using the same principle as a glider fuselage or wing. i covered the plywood body mould with wet paper and laminated the surface with fiberglass, rubbed down the outside, removed the mould from inside, had it upholstered and added the leg. in the end i installed the red telephone on the inside wall of the chair. the naming part of the chair was easy, the ball chair was born."

these and other eero aarnio designs can still be purchased. if you have a look here you’ll find a link to someone in your country who stocks these delightful items.

the globe chair was to have been the real focus of this post but to be really honest, eero arnio’s work is so amazing that it deserves a little bit of a going over if only as homage to the globe chair's obvious design heritage. that having been said, this item is also a lovely design in its own right.

not quite as earth-shattering for its time but still very lovely and somewhat desirable. if you nip over to fathom designs, you’ll find three lovely products but in my opinion it is the globe chair that carries away the most desirable object award. i love its symmetry and then too the swooping longitudinal curves. you’d want to pack it with nice cushions or line it with something that would make it kind to your back and bum, but overall this is one pleasing piece of furniture.