DesignerGerman-Austrian
Michael Thonet
2 active items
Few objects in the history of design have traveled as far, appeared in as many settings, or proven as quietly useful as the chairs that came out of Michael Thonet's workshops. Born on 2 July 1796 in Boppard, a small town on the Rhine in what is now Germany, Thonet trained as a cabinetmaker and opened his own workshop in 1819. His early experiments in the 1830s focused on laminated and bent wood slats - a painstaking process of gluing thin layers of wood and pressing them into curves while wet. The result was the Bopparder Schichtholzstuhl, first exhibited in 1836, which attracted enough attention to change the course of Thonet's life.
At the 1841 trade fair in Koblenz, Thonet caught the attention of Prince Metternich, who brought him to Vienna the following year. There Thonet worked on the interiors of the Liechtenstein Palace, but his real ambition lay in solving a manufacturing problem: how to produce elegant, lightweight, curved furniture at industrial scale without relying on expensive handwork. The breakthrough came in 1855, when he discovered that solid beechwood, steamed at 100 degrees Celsius and pressed into cast-iron moulds, could be bent into sweeping curves and would hold its shape permanently once cooled and dried. The method was cheaper, faster, and stronger than anything that had come before. It earned Thonet patents that gave him a near-monopoly on the process.
In 1853, he transferred the business to his five sons under the name Gebrüder Thonet, and it was under that banner that the firm achieved its extraordinary reach. The No. 14 chair, introduced in 1859, distilled the principle to its essence: six pieces of steam-bent beechwood, ten screws, two nuts. The parts could be packed thirty-six chairs to a cubic metre of shipping space and assembled at the destination - a logistics insight that predated flat-pack furniture by a century. Between 1859 and 1930, Gebrüder Thonet sold 50 million No. 14 chairs. By 1912, the firm's factories were producing 1.8 million pieces a year.
Thonet died on 3 March 1871, before the full extent of that success became clear. But his method and his furniture outlived him in ways that are still visible today. In the 1920s, Le Corbusier placed No. 14 chairs in his villas and wrote admiringly of their economy and honesty. Marcel Breuer, Mart Stam, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe all worked with Gebrüder Thonet to produce their cantilever steel-tube chairs - the firm that had pioneered industrial wood production became equally important to the Bauhaus generation. The company's lineage survives today in three separate successor companies: Thonet GmbH in Germany, Thonet Vienna in Austria, and TON in the Czech Republic, which continues to manufacture from the original factory in Bystrice pod Hostynem.
On the Nordic auction market, Thonet pieces appear regularly - chairs dominate, accounting for 35 of the 41 items recorded at Auctionist, with the No. 14 and No. 30 models most frequently offered. Stockholms Auktionsverk accounts for the largest share of sales, reflecting sustained collector interest in Scandinavian design circles. Sets of four armchairs in the No. 30 model have sold for up to 9,000 SEK, while sets of six No. 14 dining chairs typically reach 7,000-7,500 SEK. The market for Thonet is steady rather than speculative - these are objects that buyers intend to use, which is, in the end, exactly what Thonet built them for.