The most iconic wood and metal chairs of the Mid Century style

“I read some blogs, and I think, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me…’. Someone in their 20s writes that Roger’s office looks ‘soooo 1970s,’ when, in fact, the furniture is from 1955!“

This is how Claudette Didul, the decorator of the famous Mad Men sets, described in an interview her feeling when she learned that there were viewers who didn’t think the sets were believable enough. The series that brought Mid-Century furniture back into fashion, however, took the aesthetic aspect of each episode very seriously. So much so that most of its pieces were originals found on Craigslist – something like the American Wallapop – and at typical ‘garage sales’, where homeowners who are moving out get rid of furniture they don’t need.

From 2007 to 2015, Mad Men not only made us dream about Don Draper, Betty, Peggy, and Joan—while winning every industry award possible—it also turned its furniture into a topic of conversation, making us long for what many consider to be the golden age of design. During the mid-20th century, the names that would eventually become icons in this field gave birth to their most brilliant and unforgettable creations.

The wonderful thing is that, like any really good product, the most outstanding pieces from that period are timeless, and, in most cases, their pure, simple and elegant lines, functionality and lack of ornamentation make them a natural fit in any environment, whatever the style. In fact, following the mid-century craze that swept the world of interior design with the launch of the Madison Avenue fiction, we are now experiencing a period in which the trend is to acquire some of these classic pieces and incorporate them as naturally as possible into our decorative spaces.

A surefire way to get it right? Get your hands on one of the most iconic chairs from the Mid-Century period, made of wood and metal, two of the most innovative materials of the time, which gave rise to designs that were completely avant-garde for their day.

Wishbone Chair, by Hans Wegner, a wooden chair that marked the Mid Century style.

Danish designer Hans Wegner was one of the greatest exponents of the mid-century Organic Functionality style, a Scandinavian design movement that focused on functionality and also included icons such as Poul Henningsen, Alvar Aalto, and Arne Jacobsen.

His chairs were a great example of these ideas: he designed more than 500 different ones, of which around 100 were mass-produced. It is difficult to choose just one, but perhaps the most representative is the Wishbone wooden chair.

This chair, inspired by a portrait of a Danish merchant sitting on a Chinese chair from the Ming dynasty, was one of three he designed for Carl Hansen & Søn in 1949. It combined the upper rails and arms into a single piece, a very avant-garde feature when it was first produced, which today continues to give it an attractive appearance of lightness and modernity.

A large wooden chair that leaves no one indifferent, the Chandigarh chair by Pierre Jeanneret.

Pierre Jeanneret, Le Corbusier’s cousin, designed for the administrative buildings of the new Indian city of Chandigarh, designed from scratch by the architect, a complete line of furniture of functional and refined forms, which referred to the Modern Movement.

However, as agreed with the Indian government they were made in local workshops, using local materials that were affordable and appropriate for the climate, such as teak wood, wicker, bamboo and leather.

Soon, the different variants of Jeanneret’s inverted v-shaped v-shaped chair, originally intended as office furniture, became the object of desire among decor lovers all over the world and came to be known as the Chandigarh chair.

As no furniture sketches signed by Pierre Jeanneret have been found -it is assumed that they were his from interviews and other information-, there is no official data of his authorship. Therefore his designs can be reproduced at will, so you can get your hands on a replica of the iconic Chandigarh chair, with a frame made of elm wood and seat and back in rattan lattice.

H269 Chair, by Jindrich Halabala

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The mid-century designer Jindrich Halabala was the one who initiated the mass production of furniture for the Czechoslovak market, and one of the pioneers in employing the use of steel tubes. Among all the pieces he created, two fundamental series of modular furniture, the H and E chairs, stand out. The H269, with a design that was both streamlined and surprisingly stable was perhaps his greatest success.

This piece is no longer in production, but we can find others inspired by his design, such as the Galapagos chair, with a tubular steel structure and seat and back upholstered in leather.

Les Arcs chair, by Charlotte Perriand. Once again an icon in the wood and metal chairs of the Mid Century style.

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Charlotte Perriand was one of the few women who gained notoriety as designers in the mid-century. Famous for her love of organic forms, she was a collaborator of Le Corbusier, and achieved fame through large and innovative pieces, such as the Les Arcs chair.

The same, in brown leather and combined with the tubular metal structure popularized by her contemporary Marcel Breuer, is an example of industrial style seating that represented a daring aesthetic bet. Today however, it has become a popular choice among dining room furniture, through pieces such as the handcrafted Mali, also with a tubular steel frame and a seat made of genuine goatskin.

Cesca chair, by Marcel Breuer, metal and rattan.

The Hungarian modernist architect Marcel Breuer changed the course of chair history with his Cesca, named after his adopted daughter Francesca. It altered the design landscape thanks to its “cantilevered” structure, i.e. not supported on four legs, as had traditionally been the case. It is also striking that its tubular steel structure is a single piece.

The combination of this material with the seat cane was also unconventional, and was notably different from any other chair available at the time. Thus, without fear of a complete break with the familiar, Breuer paved the way for other cantilevered metal seating that appeared during the 20th century.

Bertoia chair, a metal model that aroused interest during the Mid Century.

Harry Bertoia found sublime grace in an industrial material, experimenting with bending metal rods and creating a series of timelessly designed chairs that look delicate, but are nonetheless strong and durable. The Italian sculptor and designer who made his career in the United States, spoke of them as follows: “If you look at these chairs, they are mainly air, like sculpture. Space passes through them.”

Over time, contemporary designers like Gaurav Nanda delved into this path opened by Bertoia with pieces like the Malika chair.

A universe of wood and metal chairs as groundbreaking as they are classic.

The designers of the era known as Mid-Century revolutionized the furniture scene in the mid-1950s with chairs in which they used wood and metal in avant-garde and ground-breaking ways. Today, however, thanks to their know-how, these pieces have become great classics of decoration. Which one is your favorite?