Chair Hunting on Muleback: A Curator’s Collecting Journey
Editors Minjeong Kim and Sunjin Kim | Photographer Miyeon Jeon
Poitiers Station lies about one hour and 40 minutes from Paris by TGV high-speed train. From there, it is roughly another hour by car to Domaine de Boisbuchet. Set in a remote village in southwestern France and surrounded by nature, the château holds everything about design that Alexander von Vegesack, former director of the Vitra Design Museum, seeks to contemplate and enjoy.
The full interview is featured in Magazine C Issue 2 ‘No. 14 chair’.
You traveled to Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria, Poland, and as far as Andalusia in Spain to collect Thonet furniture. You must have plenty of interesting stories.
In early summer, I used to visit The Rasto flea market in Madrid and then spend my holidays in Andalusia. A friend and I set off with three horses into the mountains of southern Andalusia. Under Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, the use of maps was strictly forbidden, so we had to make our way along mule tracks. At night, we slept in huts warmed by charcoal fires or in inns for travelers on horseback. And that’s where I found some very worn-out Thonet chairs. When I asked the owners where they’d gotten them, they said they’d simply kept them because they couldn’t afford new ones. So I gave them money to buy new chairs and offered to swap them for the old ones.
I heard the competition among collectors for Thonet chairs was fierce.
Karl Lagerfeld, who was collecting bentwood furniture at the same time, was someone I could never beat at auction. His influence was so great that when he put a château he had furnished with bentwood pieces up for auction, Thonet prices stabilized again. Later, when Lagerfeld began collecting Memphis and Ettore Sottsass furniture, I was finally able to buy major Thonet models at normal prices. Years later, when he visited the Vitra Design Museum, we talked about those past auctions. Afterward, Lagerfeld sent me a framed photograph of a simple chair as a gift.
The road to building your current collection can’t have been easy.
Finding old furniture catalogs was especially difficult. Thonet lent its catalogs to its branches around the world for only 12 months at a time. The aim was to keep them from selling at the previous year’s prices if prices went up. Apparently, a branch that failed to return its catalog had to pay a fine equal to a month’s salary. So in my early collecting days, finding old catalogs was impossible. The only solution was to travel to the former Thonet factories in Eastern Europe, but back then that was also considered industrial espionage. For these trips, I used an old Mercedes-Benz van that could carry furniture and that I could also sleep in. I loaded it with bentwood chairs I’d found at flea markets across Europe and showed them to Georg Thonet. When I found identical pieces, I sometimes sold them to him.
So you pressed ahead with these adventures despite the complicated political situation in Eastern Europe.
One wrong move and we could have been imprisoned. But the factories were the only places we could get information, so my friend and I would visit the factory in Czechoslovakia and wait for people to finish work. Around six, when people who looked like architects or engineers came out, we’d approach them, ask if they could help us, and request catalogs, brochures, and so on. Sometimes the police stopped us to ask what we were doing or to look inside the van.
What is it about Thonet’s bentwood furniture that sparked your passion as a collector?
The secret to Thonet’s success was making sturdy, affordable chairs for everyone with minimal materials and labor. As early as the 19th century, Michael Thonet knew what a successful furniture industry required. So he built his factories near the largest beech forests in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He also set up a production process based on assembly lines that unskilled workers, such as ordinary farmers rather than specialized craftsmen, could operate. He promoted his products worldwide through catalogs featuring photographs of the furniture. By disassembling 36 chairs and shipping them in a single 1 m³ box, he could sell them even in Latin America for less than locally made products.
I’m curious how you would assess the No. 14 chair in particular.
If you look closely at the No. 14 chair, there isn’t a single unnecessary part. It’s light, too. One person can carry two in each arm, so it’s easy to move four at a time. The woven cane seat is comfortable and allows good ventilation in hot southern countries. It’s also easy to assemble and take apart, so even if part of a chair breaks, the undamaged components can be used to repair other chairs. It truly is the chair that symbolizes Thonet’s success.
The No. 14 chair is also seen as a symbol of the leisure culture of its time, epitomized by Vienna’s coffeehouses, and of the emergence of a new lifestyle. What are your thoughts on this?
I can’t say Thonet’s chairs intentionally encouraged social life. Michael Thonet, who created the No. 14 chair, moved to Vienna at the invitation of the Austrian chancellor of the time and worked for the palaces where the emperor and the nobility lived. I believe this is what led Thonet to come up with new furniture and new uses for it. Still, it’s true that people benefited from being able to buy chairs at low prices. Young people in particular no longer had to furnish their homes with their parents’ furniture. It’s similar to the role Ikea plays today. Thonet conquered the market with very low prices.
Thonet’s bentwood furniture is still mass-produced as new pieces today. Is Thonet’s design still relevant?
If many companies are still doing this today, it must be because it’s still profitable. There’s always a need for simple, practical, affordable chairs. I myself still love several models, like the No. 14 chair and No. 25. No. 25 in particular has three bentwood elements in its backrest, which makes it very comfortable to lean against.
Today, several manufacturers produce the No. 14 chair. Can only one particular brand call its version the original?
I’m aware this question matters in the vintage trade. But as far as I know, anyone can reproduce a design 75 years after the creator’s death. Wherever they are, if today’s manufacturers make the No. 14 chair exactly according to Thonet’s early design principles, I think it can be called an original. But I’m not a lawyer, and there are very few references on this issue today. Though lawyers do sometimes visit the Boisbuchet library to settle patent issues. (Laughs)
How large is your collection of Thonet bentwood furniture? Is there a model you focus on most?
About 20 years ago, I sold much of my collection to the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna. I kept only the pieces that were meaningful in the evolution of industrial design, and I think that’s enough. So I currently own about 100 Thonet pieces, but if you narrow it down to the truly important ones, there are only about 50. I have key examples that clearly show developments in technology, materials, and design, from works of the Boppard period to laminate samples made by stacking layers of plywood. I’d be very happy to own an early No. 14 chair, made at its most elegant when the bentwood technique was perfected.
As cofounder of the Vitra Design Museum, you developed its entire program for 23 years starting in 1989. What were your collecting criteria?
I’ve been collecting furniture since 1968. Drawing on that long experience, I also expanded the Vitra Design Museum’s collection. The criteria included new materials, technologies, and advances and innovations in design. Of course, I also value inspiring design. Whether at a restaurant, a café, or someone’s home, there are chairs that make you expect, from the very first glance, to discover countless secrets and new facts hidden within them. But I’m far more interested in exploring and discovering chairs in terms of the development of industrial design. Above all, making a sturdy, comfortable chair that can withstand every kind of shock and strain is an extremely difficult task. Countless carpenters, designers, and architects have tried, but few have succeeded. That’s also why I became interested in Michael Thonet.
You now run Boisbuchet and pursue a range of activities, including exhibiting your private collection. What has sustained your passion for design for so long?
Boisbuchet opened in the same year and the same week as the Vitra Design Museum, and the Berlin Wall fell that same week. We took all of this as a good omen. At Boisbuchet, I met young, talented designers I later worked with at the Vitra Design Museum. The museum’s patrons took an interest in Boisbuchet’s workshops and exhibition themes and helped our work run smoothly. It was an ideal collaboration. But in 2011, I stepped down as director of the Vitra Design Museum and decided to focus on my personal project, Boisbuchet. Since then, the Boisbuchet summer workshops have grown steadily, and for the past four years we’ve also offered an additional program for artist residencies. We curate exhibitions at the château and take them on tour around the world. What we value most at Boisbuchet is practical experience, something that’s hard to find at universities today. Thousands of people have taken part in Boisbuchet workshops so far. Some have come back as tutors, and some of their children have joined in turn. All of this is what keeps me going.
Want to dive deeper?
Issue.02 No.14
Introduced by Michael Thonet in 1859, Chair No. 14 is widely known as the 'café chair.' From the nineteenth century to the present day, it has been found wherever people gather—cafés, restaurants, and bars—across eras and borders. Thonet devised bentwood and assembly techniques suited to factory mass production, realized international distribution through flat-pack packaging, and promoted the chair through catalogs, bringing technical innovation, efficiency, and accessibility together in a single design. At the starting point of the 'modern chair'—one anyone could purchase and use at a reasonable price with consistent quality—stands Chair No. 14, with its classic design and elegant beauty.
