Janine Abraham & Dirk-Jan Rol

“This chair, long regarded as the finest rattan chair in the world, was the culmination of research by Janine Abraham and Dirk-Jan Rol into how rattan might be modernized. The original impetus for this work came from France’s Rattan Trade Association which was keen to update this age- old art. It tasked the two designers with creating a series of seats and showcasing them in various trade shows. With the help of Rougier, a furniture manufacturer specializing in this particular material, they designed and produced a number of remarkable pieces which were displayed at various Paris trade fairs in the mid-1950s. However, apart from the images now considered iconic, nothing concrete came of these public appearances and the designers, realizing that their vision appeared too innovative, too strange even, had only to pack up their prototypes and leave.
But not everyone ignored them. Shortly afterwards Jean Royère sent to Janine Abraham a letter of congratulations which contained a picture of several Soleil armchairs on the Shah of Iran’s terrace. The designers hadn’t even been told that Rougier had gone ahead with production! In fact, this model was the only one to have been manufactured, albeit in small quantities. The interest of this chair resides in the way it appropriates a traditional technique to create modern shapes and levels of comfort. The couple used the natural flexibility of the material to fashion it into a twin structure which endows the chair with strength and comfort. It also determines its shape because the rattan can bend no further. Where the couple’s talent really shone through was their success in integrating all these different factors and restrictions into a design that was extremely structured yet almost abstract. This marriage of a torus and a circular hyperboloid seems to be so obviously made in heaven that you could take it for a natural form, yet at the same time, it’s an incredibly striking design. ”

Materials: Rattan.

Style: French Mid-Century.