Nowadays, the industrial style knows a considerable development. All industrial furniture and decoration can fit as well in a country house as in a purely design placed. Besides its functional aspect, its plays on the raw and on metallic materials, also on the straight lines and turns away easily to make it essential.

Every metal’ furniture used in the work’s world can become a nice piece of furniture in your own home and add a real industrial vintage character.

Its story began during the 18th century. Privilege of the powerful, the metallic furniture became more democratic under the Second Empire and under the Industrial Revolution to join now the house. It became aristocratic stylish and popular at the same time.

The industrial aesthetics was born in 1851, when Sir Joseph Paxton, engineer and nursery gardener of Queen Victoria, designed and built in a few months the huge Crystal Palace, of cast iron and glass, for the world fair of London. The Eiffel Tower, built in 1889, is another embodiment.

The first industrial furniture is deliberately functional. They are made to fit for a particular function in the industry. It’s in France, in 1969, that the brand Prisunic had launched the first collection of steel furniture for the house.

Continue reading “What is the industrial furniture style?” »

Sewing machines were not the only things manufactured by the world-famous Singer Company! They also manufactured some great industrial furniture such as the Singer stool and the Singer chair, a must-have for vintage lovers!

New York, 1851, I.M. Singer & Company is created. Isaac Merritt Singer (1811-1875) is the inventor of the sewing machine. At first, all the items were manufactured in New York, Frederick Gilbert Bourne (1851-1919), head of the firm at the beginning of the 20^th century, built up the first worldwide company in spreading the brand all over the world by establishing some customer and distribution services in every countries, and also in building many different factories abroad.

Isaac Merritt Singer had invented the hire-purchase system in order to equip as many women as possible. “Owning a Singer was the ambition of many working women, who would buy them on credit, with a subscription. Many married women hoped to earn some extra money while taking care of their homes”.

Please read more

First built in the USA in the 40’s (1944 in Hanover, Pennsylvania) by Emeco (Electric Machine and Equipment Company) for use on the American submarines and warships, to answer their specified contract “the chair had to be able to withstand torpedo blasts to the side of a destroyer”. And in fact Emeco’s founder in participation with Alcoa’s experts, Witton C and Dinges, have designed the 1006, an industrial chair so durable that it far exceeded the Navy’s specifications.

The Navy Chair has been in continuous production ever since. The Emeco chair embodies the perfect shape and material fusion.

It is a handmade item. Made of aluminium (so antimagnetic) very light but also very strong (can support more than 500kgs). The craftsmen take twelve parts being welded together, then being ground to create a seamless one-piece look. Finally, the chair is anodized for a durable finish. They need 4 hours to make it with around 50 movements and 77 steps Process.

This marine chair will go threw all oceans until the 70’s: during the cold war the sales stopped. And in 1998, Gregg Buchbinder acquires the Emeco Company and brings it a new corporate culture. He asked the French designer Philippe Starck to work with him. It is a success: the turnover gets a 300% rising and the staff triple!

After Philippe Starck many great designers have designed the “Navy 1006”, like Norman Foster, Frank Gehry, and Andree Putmann, they all signed a reedition.

Nowadays, “The Navy Chair” is still manufactured and the The aficionados give it the nickname of “Ten o six”.

You would like to find an original one?

Continue reading

Nicolle Stool: a fantastic Vintage Industrial Furniture

From 1913, the “Etablissements Nicolle”, based in Montreuil, France, were specialized in the manufacture of washers (the Belleville washer very well known). As they needed better metal stools for their workers, they designed the “Nicolle Stool” for their own use and for some of their neighbouring factories. So was born this iconic Industrial Furniture:  The “Nicolle Stool” in 1933, with its three stamped metal legs and a seat in the shape of a large washer.

Soon afterwards they added a backrest, which was compared after the war to the “tail of a whale”, creating the “Nicolle Chair”. The industrial stool later became stackable and a fourth leg was added to increase its stability (and because of safety standards at the time). Soon, it was bought and used in factories all over France. It was available in eight different heights, ranging from 45 cm to 80 cm, making it suitable for use with many kinds of machinery.

In 1954, the company “Etablissements Nicolle” designed two different models of industrial stool with adjustable screws: the 45/60 and the 60/80.

Read more about the Nicolle stool

How an industrial furniture used by each french post office became an icon of Industrial Design?

In the edge of the first war, it was created for the French post, also called “Tri Postal“.  This metal furniture was a clever system, designed to answer at best to the many times reproduced gestures and to the postures of the post-office employees in the sorting rooms. It can be considered like one of the first ergonomic furniture of the industrial era.

If we go back in its family tree, we can find two ancestors. Until 1850, they used to store the mail in wicker suitcases, and this mail was essentially made by stagecoach. But the industrial era, the arrival of the railroad and the succession of the rural mailman in most of the back countryside lead the post office to get organize and began to sort out the mail, which meant to supersede the wicker suitcases to wooden lockers. And this change has to be done in Europe quite as in the United States of America, where the Taylorism success to increase the productivity of the workers, in the first decades of the 20^th century, was going to introduce the idea of ergonomics.

So before the beginning of the First World War, the French post office becomes aware of the importance of the sorting operations. She began to study the gestures and postures of the workers, analysed their work behavior, and decomposed their movements, like the graphic designers are doing with their cartoons! Unfortunately, the approach remains empirical and few of these documents from that time were archived.

Those sorting desks were certainly not designed by chance…

Continue reading “An awesome vintage industrial furniture: the sorting desk.” »