Bistro chairs at Café

Bistro chairs at Café Nemours, near the Louvre Bistro chairs at Galerie Vivienne, 19th century shopping mall As the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe once said, “A chair is a very difficult object. A skyscraper is almost easier.” Mies would have known because he introduced what’s been called ‘the Platonic ideal of the chair’, aka the Barcelona chair, at the 1929 Barcelona International Exposition. He fabricated it specifically for the Spanish King Alfonso XIII and his wife, Ena, in case they needed a rest while visiting the German pavilion, which he also designed. Mies drew his inspiration from an Egyptian folding chair and a Roman folding stool. But there was a chair perhaps more comfortable than anything the great minimalist Mies or his Roman and Egyptian influences created. And it was introduced on a mass scale to the fifteen million who visited the Exposition Universelle of 1867 in Paris. Sometimes also known as the no. 14 chair or the Thonet (rhymes with bonnet), the bistro chair was originally designed by German cabinet maker Michael Thonet. ‘Bistro’ may come from the French bistraud, which more or less translates to ‘little servant’, or more fancifully from the Russian bistro (spellings vary), meaning ‘hurry’. The notion that its origin lies in the word ‘hurry’ comes from the 1814 occupation of Paris by France’s enemies following Napolean’s Great Retreat from Moscow. The occupiers included the Russians who, according to the legend, found bossing waiters to be a richly satisfying form of empowerment. It took Thonet years to bend wood just the right way using steam to create the perfect design resulting in the bistro chair’s impeccable blend of form and function. He heated half a dozen pieces of beechwood with steam, pressed the segments into curved cast-iron molds where they dried in the desired easygoing shape. Comfort was paramount, and woven palm or cane were ingeniously chosen for its upholstery, allowing spilled — and sometimes thrown — beverages, whether spilled by accident or in anger, to gracefully drain away, keeping the seat dry and your spirits high. The no. 14 chair won a coveted gold medal at the 1867 fair, and from that moment on its fame spread with the quickness of a meme. The Geppetto of this wood creation may have been a craftsman from the Rhine Valley, but after winning the award in Paris (and helped by Thonet’s patent expiring in 1869), the chair transformed into something quintessentially French, a kind of furniture immigrant who becomes more indigenous than the native inhabitants themselves. Over the decades, the bistro chair has proven its staying power with the unavoidability of sunrise and the permanence of wind. This masterpiece of the sedentary also became the world’s very first mass-produced furniture item, selling a jaw-dropping fifty million units by 1930. Its appeal — like that of champagne and Roquefort cheese — extended far beyond the borders of France. It wasn’t just local demand that fueled the bistro chair industry’s growth. The seats soon found 54 | The Good Life France The Good Life France | 55