One thing that in both modern and old chair styles had was there over al decorative design fitted with the feel and decor of the room itself, although a lot of modern design is made to look sleek and to hide within each other to create a clean finnish the older styles had far more going on in the cense art and pattern work as well as fine details so even though it was far more over the top and extravagant it fitted in with the room design. 

Uses of chairs

threw out time the simple chair has been taken from a tool to a decorative piece of furniture to show wealth and now both use and aesthetics are just as important as the other, but with a lot of modern design simple is better and are furniture design reflects that.

looking at these examples you can see the simple shapes to use little material but still look exciting, elegant and modern. With more traditional chairs i.e. during the Victorian age, chairs were far more adventures and bold to show granger and status. 

Also chairs of these time periods were hand crafted and were made to last, and now we have cheap quick and easy to produce chairs that look nice but do not last long or are made in the same process but made by a well known designer and has a huge price tag.

With my work i intend to bring elements from both together to create well made cheap personalised chairs that rival what the victorians made but still fit in with modern society at a low cost.

the second is matt black body and high quality black velvet covering.

two completed chairs

The first is red silk with matt black spray paint and a black tarnished studding.

First and second chairs

 I first went about stripping the chairs to find any problems, luckily the only main one was the foam seating of one of them was in really bad condition. i measured up the size of the foam and bought a new replacement which i cut, grated and sanded to shape.

i then went on to choosing materials, as well as colour scheme. As i said before i wanted a dark feeling to my chairs and to bring old with the new so i went with matt black wood and a deep red silk and a high grade black velvet for the other. i went with two completely different materials as to see the over all outcome, i new the velvet would work as it was nice and thick so would create a nice smooth even finish but the silk is so much more pliable so would be hard to get a even finish.

 i cut out from the original material the pattern for the seat coverings and proceeded to apply them to the chairs.

As they were reproduction they did not use original nails but staples which is what i used as well.

looking and finding my first 2 chairs.

I had a reasonable idea about what i was looking for; something reasonably chunky that i wouldn't damage easily for my first full sized chair to work on. i looked around any where and every where and found a couple on line that i managed to win in a auction, the plus size to these chairs was that they were both reproduction and exactly the same besides a few bumps and nicks in the wood. 

Chairs

For this project i am planning to create a range of stylised chairs with a dark theme. i want to take existing classic style arm chairs and give them a new life and meaning that people of are time would like. I want to make this project eco friendly as the trends today are being eco-freindly and "green", plus this keep certain costs down but adds some parameters to work within. I also plan to make a singular chair that i will work on and document to which i will use a "destruct and construct" method which will Intel me striping a chair down and then damaging or "destructing" the chair and then documenting that and then constructing something new with what i have from that point and again documenting my steps. this process will be repeated so by the end there will hopefully but just a skeleton of the original chair.