Designed: 1993
Vermelha Chair
Origin: Italy
The Vermelha chair is an iconic piece, originally conceived and prototyped in 1993 for a gallery show in São Paulo along with several other pieces. The construction of the chair is very time-intensive, as it is handmade from a huge length of rope wrapped and woven to create the chair’s structure. Though the piece is beautiful, no one really believed real upholstery could be made using ropes. Everybody who saw it would comment, “Oh, this is an art piece. This cannot be a successful furniture design.” Many people were cynical about the chair, and it received a lot of criticism at the time.
Wrap-around armchair with steel frame painted with epoxy powders. Several days’ manual work is required to build the seat, together with high expertise for the weaving. The five hundred metres of special rope with an acrylic core, covered in cotton, are first woven onto the frame to create a structure and then plaited by consecutive overlapping, leaving sufficient surplus to form a kind of random weave which creates an unusual padding.
Size: H 77 cm, Seat H 38 cm, W 86 cm, Depth 58 cm
