There's nothing quite as welcoming as the common American invitation to “pull up a chair”. But take a moment of consideration before you take up the offer. Your lower back will thank you for being discerning about which chair you choose and, though they all perform essentially the same function, there are as many different chairs in the world as there are designers, cultures, rooms, offices and flat-topped rocks out in the wild.
BBC presenter and economist, Evan Davis once said, “A chair's function isn't just to provide a place to sit; it's to provide a medium for self-expression. Chairs are about status, for example. Or signalling something about oneself. That's why the words chair, seat and bench have found themselves used to describe high status professions, from academia to parliament to the law.”
Hello, and take a seat
If you've never really given the chair much thought, consider that a few years ago architect Witold Rybczynski devoted a large book, Now I Sit Me Down, to the appreciation of the chair and its 5,000-year history. “The way we choose to sit, and what we choose to sit on, says a lot about us: our values, our tastes, the things we hold dear,” he writes. “You are how you sit.”
Throughout the last few thousand years, the chair has weaved in and out of being a socially stratified piece of furniture, Rybczynski notes. He identifies a sculpture of a chair from the Cycladic islands in the Aegean Sea as the first on historical record, dated to the period 2,800 -2,700 BC. The ancient Egyptian civilisation turned the chair into a status symbol. “Everyone sat on stools or on the ground, but chairs with backs or armrests were reserved for the elite,” according to Rybczynski.
Later, the Greeks invented the klismos with outwardly curving legs and a backrest. This was in the fifth century B.C. and Rybczynski contends that it wasn't until more than 2,000 years later that chairs “of equal elegance” to the klismos emerged, The “golden age” of chairs in the 18th century saw a flurry of creative craftsmanship and global trade produce ornate items such as the French Louis XV armchair and Chinese/English cabriole-legged furniture. The klismos chair was pretty democratic — workers, musicians, high ranking rulers, women and even gods are depicted sitting in it, but by the Middle Ages the chair imparted status — the proletariat sat on the ground, benches or barrels while chairs and thrones with arms and backs were only for important people.
It's difficult to single out the best chair designers in history because some of the best designs are anonymous. The creator of the klismos is unknown as is the designer of the Chinese folding chair, which, Rybczynski says, “is marvellous and influenced deck chairs, director’s chairs, and folding stools”. He adds, “The wing chair and the rocking chair are likewise anonymous designs, as is the Windsor chair”. Charles and Ray Eames, of course made very well-designed chairs, but the grand canon of chair design hasn't taken African designs much into account. What we do know about chairs, which is borne out by the fact that many of the designers aren't known, is that chair design was often the result of collaboration by members of particular communities.
Seated in Africa
At the inaugural Design Week South Africa (Cape Town edition), held last weekend at various venues around the City Bowl, LOOKBOOK Studio and Marlon James Interior Architecture presented the Africa Chair exhibition, celebrating African design and ingenuity, and spotlighting the intersections of tradition and innovation, and the importance of community through an unusual collection of chairs, stools and benches from the African continent.
The exhibition was hosted at the Orms Form Hall, a creative space in Cape Town's Gardens district. It featured several pieces that reflect local resourcefulness and cultural identity, for example, a mended red plastic chair from the Yenza: Make It Collection, a symbol of resourcefulness in the face of scarcity. The Yenza: Make It! project celebrated self-made objects, sourced from homes in some of Cape Town’s informal settlements, which prioritise function over style and celebrate the human ingenuity born of basic needs. It's the creativity that results from Africa’s enduring underground culture of “make a plan”.
Design Rooted in Heritage and Collaboration
The many traditional pieces on show included a Baoulé chair from Côte D’Ivoire, a cowrie shell-adorned stool from Congo and a Tuareg camel saddle from Niger. Baoulé chairs are carved from wood, with intricate artistic details and often feature figurative carvings and geometric patterns. They're practical objects, but also works of art that reflect Baoulé beliefs, spirituality and culture.
On the contemporary end, Malian Cheick Diallo’s Dumbia chair merges architectural precision with tactile materials, while South African Xandre Kriel’s Boog Chair is a work of technical minimalism. Pieces like these foreground Africa as both an aesthetic and a cultural priority, with each chair serving as a dialogue between past and present, individual creativity and collective narratives.
All chairs were exhibited on breezeblocks and airbricks by KLAY.
Sustainability and Ingenuity in African Furniture
The exhibition highlights themes of sustainability, featuring works like the Tyre Chair by Nelson Banderson, crafted from discarded rubber, and blacksmith Conrad Hicks' tractor seat stool, forged using vintage industrial tools. The Mahamb’ehlala prototype stool from Andile Dyalvane’s iThongo series, deeply rooted in his ancestral Xhosa traditions, used ceramic stools as symbols of community and healing, underscoring how materials — whether reclaimed, traditional, or novel — can tell stories of resilience and rebirth.
A Series of Gatherings to Celebrate African Creativity
The intention of the Africa Chair exhibition was to be the first in a series of events dedicated to exploring the possibilities of African creativity. The co-curators envisioned the event as the beginning of an ongoing conversation around African design, inviting future collaborations that encourage artists, designers and creators to support each other, and question the balances (and imbalances) of the African continent. The event offered a platform to celebrate design as a tool for connection and expression, encouraging audiences to explore the stories embedded in each piece.
Rybczynski makes the point that there’s nothing natural or inevitable about humans sitting on chairs, despite their 5,000-year-plus history. In fact, many humans in many different communities sit on the floor instead of on a piece of furniture and societies are generally cleaved along the lines of floor and chair sitting. For those that do share the culture of chair sitting, each chair tells a story, as the Africa Chair exhibition so ably demonstrates.
Perhaps the best chair story of all is the Roald Dahl classic, Parson's Pleasure, in which Boggis, a skilled antiques dealer, makes a tidy sum each year by buying valuable furniture cheaply from unsuspecting country people while posing as a clergyman and president of the Society for the Preservation of Rare Furniture. Finding a rare and priceless Chippendale in the barn of some locals, he manages to convince them to sell it at a bargain price, since, he says, it's really only “firewood”. Delighted by his subterfuge Boggis goes to get his car to take the piece away. In the meantime the owners decide to help Boggis out by sawing up the piece, assuming that's the only way he'll get it into his car, and since Boggis called it “firewood” anyway. As they wait for Boggis to return, they comment that the item was made by a “bloody good carpenter no matter what the parson says”.
