13 modern chair designs that remain utterly timeless

French designer Bernard Govin’s ‘Elliptique‘ was created for the renowned Italian manufacturer Saporiti Italia in the 1960s, a pivotal moment in the history of Italian design. The collection is defined by elegant lines, organic forms and sumptuous materials.

The offered three armchairs, as well as a matching settee (offered separately), exemplify Govin’s ability to harness natural phenomena, creating immersive ‘seating landscapes’ that elevate furniture to an expressive, transcendent experience.

Danish designer Hans Wegner began his career at 14 years old with an apprenticeship to a cabinet maker followed by stints working with Arne Jacobsen and Johannes Hansen before opening his own practice in 1943. Wegner’s success helped place Danish mid-century design on the global stage, and he remains a defining voice of the movement.

Produced in 1953, the ‘Valet’ Chair is one of Wegner’s most inventive designs. The sleek back of the chair design cleverly doubles as a jacket hanger, while the seat contains a hidden drawer.

Born and raised in Paris, André Groult was a pioneering figure of the Art Deco movement. Groult’s revolutionary designs rewrote the visual language of 18th- and 19th-century design with a contemporary spin, famously crafting his creations in unconventional materials like mica and shagreen.

This desk and side chair are stellar examples of Groult’s command of material, with rays and stripes of contrasting woods. Though modern in spirit, the design also draws on history— most notably in the curved back legs of the chair, a tenet of French furniture originally devised to accommodate officers wearing swords at their hips.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe left Germany and came to the United States in 1937, quickly rising to prominence and solidifying his fame with iconic structures such as New York’s Seagram Building. His innovative designs defined the language of American modernism.

These tubular chairs, inspired by Marcel Breuer, helped shift the reigning narrative of the time that tubular steel was unsuitable for furniture. Here the slight spring of the steel provides added comfort to the cantilever design.

Executed in 1905, these armchairs embody the ethos of Viennese Secessionist design in silhouette and construction, reflecting the rigorous design principles that defined turn-of-the-century interiors in the Austrian capital.

The angled-back armchair was likely conceived to anchor the corner of a room as an intelligent response to spatial planning. The companion chair, with its exposed rear legs and open stance, would have floated in the middle of the room. Despite their differing functions, the pair is unified through their barrel backs, recalling the work of renowned Seccessionists Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser.

Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann is synonymous with Art Deco, playing a pivotal role in the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, which restored France’s prominence in the decorative arts after World War I.

Designed for the fashionable Paris restaurant Drouant, these chairs exemplify his refined balance of tradition and modernity: subtly curved rear legs, and elegant front legs punctuated by metal sabots, reference fine cabinetmaking, while the sleek structure captures the streamlined elegance of the new movement.

Robert Wilson was best known as a prolific playwright and theater director, staging avant-garde performances on his seminal stage at the Watermill Center, which he established in New York in 1992.

Wilson was also a celebrated visual artist and chairmaker, crafting seating in unconventional materials including bandages and horsehair, made to surround the stages of his productions. Blanketed in a layer of lead beneath a fiberglass base, Wilson’s ‘Stalin Chairs’ accompanied his silent opera The Life and Times of Josef Stalin. Wilson elevated furniture from the utilitarian to the lively and performative, with his designs becoming what he called ‘active participants’ in his productions.

Shaped by the Italian radical design movement of the 1960s, Gaetano Pesce rebelled against the rise of modernism and mass-produced consumer design with his amorphous colourful furniture and objects that blurred the line between fine art and furniture.

A prime example of this is Pesce’s ‘Nobody’s Perfect’ chair. Each seat is unique, cast by hand without a standardised form. Pesce’s singular designs garnered fame over the years, and he collaborated with important fashion houses such as Etro and Bottega Veneta; a set of his custom chairs lined the runway of their 2023 Milan Spring/Summer fashion show.

Josef Urban trained as an architect at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts, learning to approach design elements as pieces of an orchestra to create harmonious interiors.

The offered set of chairs were originally conceived for the iconic Paul Hofner Restaurant in Vienna and manufactured by Thonet. The design is distinguished by a single piece of leather forming both the back and seat, elegantly secured with brass rivets along the edge.

The renowned Italian architect and designer Gio Ponti built a career that spanned more than 60 years and hundreds of commissions that revolutionised how people lived, from buildings to interiors, furniture and more.

The ‘Dezza’ series exemplifies Ponti’s mastery of modernist form: the rectilinear structure, elongated seat, signature tapered legs and short back rest are juxtaposed by the subtle curvature of the armrests. The line was manufactured by Poltrona Frau in Toentino, Italy.

George Nakashima was a Japanese American woodworker who studied forestry, and later architecture at MIT. Nakashima’s designs were dictated by natural materials, in particular wood. The expressive rings, burls and knots of tree slabs are defining element of his designs.

Alongside his iconic tables, Nakashima designed seating, exploring the limitless beauty of natural materials including woven grass seats as in the offered works.

Donald Deskey was one of the United States’ most prolific modernists, moving fluidly between Art Deco luxury and industrial production. After early work in advertising and display design — including commissions for Saks & Company — he rose to prominence with major interiors such as Radio City Music Hall. He became a pioneer of streamlined, mass-produced furnishings incorporating materials like steel, chromium and glass.

In 1939, Deskey collaborated with the Chicago-based Royal Metal Manufacturing Company to produce furniture for the New York World’s Fair Exhibition The World of Tomorrow, which included this futuristic armchair. The collection was such a success, it went into serial production shortly thereafter. This model, a piece of mid-century design history, can be found in the permanent collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

André Dubreuil is a French artist who worked primarily in London. Highly influenced by the rich history of furniture from the 18th and 19th centuries, Dubreuil brought a modern voice to design through his use of iron, steel and enamel.

Also known as the poète du fer (poet of iron), Dubreuil created elegant, ethereal designs through materials historically seen as harsh and rigid. That juxtaposition is perfectly embodied in the ‘Betsy’ stool, constructed of welded sheet steel that is waxed and treated with acetylene torch burns to create the speckled surface.