Michael Thonet

They are a French icon.

Well, you might think so, but are they really? So bistro chairs are sometimes called the number 14 chairs or the Thonet chair because they were originally designed in Germany by a cabinet maker called Michael Thonet.

So it took him years to work out how to heat and bend the wood the right way to get that shape.

just perfect and he chose woven palm or cane for the upholstery which was quite genius really because if anything spilled it just went through the gaps in the weaving and the chairs were then super easy to clean so the number fourteen chair won a gold medal at the paris world fair of eighteen sixty seven every one loved it thonnet though bit silly let his patent lapse and then the french come along took the design and made it more french and it became the world's they did and they're clever for the french with their marketing stuff i tell you more on that in another episode and it it became the world's first mass-produced furniture item by 1930 huge number 50 million of these chairs had been sold