Historic object
Charles Darwin’s writing chair at Down House
Bedframe supports, castors and a writing board changed Darwin’s armchair. Its patched arms and his son’s memories reveal a working arrangement shaped around one person.
Objects · people · ideas
Browse the Library
Discover the objects, people and ideas that shaped furniture, from historic pieces to modern designs.
381 entries
Page 4 of 16
Person
Charlotte Perriand
Understand how Charlotte Perriand connected furniture with everyday and collective living through one documented 1952 commission produced with Ateliers Jean Prouvé.
Design
Charly armchair
Gerard van den Berg’s Charly treats an upholstered cover like a padded garment. A generous body sits above slender visible legs.
Historic object
Chest decorated with phoenixes, colored roundels (taegeuk), and flowers 63.121.1a–k
A Korean chest combines mother-of-pearl, tortoiseshell, rayskin and brass. Look closely at how contrasting inlays build phoenixes and flowers across its doors.
Design
Chieftain Chair
Read Finn Juhl's 1949 Chieftain Chair through its commanding scale, exposed timber frame, suspended leather forms, Guild debut and complicated name.
Historic object
Child’s high chair, 64.101.899
Look at the Met’s seventeenth-century walnut high chair through its proportions, turned rails and the different domestic scene in Maes’s The Lacemaker.
Historic object
Chinese Lacquer Folding Chair 69.217
Read Chinese Folding Chair 69.217 from its crossed legs to its carved flycatchers, and discover how a mobile frame became a dense surface of craft and good wishes.
Person
Chris Kabel
Chris Kabel connects material behaviour with the situation around an object. Mesh Chair and Wood Ring reveal different ways that context can enter furniture design.
Person
Christien Meindertsma
Christien Meindertsma follows materials through fibres, processes and collaborators, showing how research into origin can influence the next object a material becomes.
Design
Chubby chair
Kooij’s Chubby shows what remains after robotic printing: handwork, contrasting surface finishes and an assembled current chair. The making continues beyond extrusion.
Design
Cinderella Table
Demakersvan and Jeroen Verhoeven’s Cinderella Table turns historic furniture profiles into flowing plywood form. Computer cutting and patient handwork belong to the same story.
Person
Cini Boeri
Meet Cini Boeri through the solid foam of Bobo and the transparent Ghost chair, co-designed with Tomu Katayanagi for FIAM.
Design
Cirkel Coffee Table 01
Daphna Isaacs Burggraaf and Laurens Manders develop Cirkel furniture from a circle. Coffee Table 01 shows how cutting, turning and contrasting materials give geometry a new role.
Person
Clara Porset
A furnishing proposal for farming families reveals how Clara Porset and Xavier Guerrero used pine, ixtle and jute—and why the drawing needed both their names.
Design
Clay furniture
Maarten Baas’s Clay furniture retains the marks of hand modelling over a metal skeleton, giving a finished object a lively and visibly individual surface.
Design
Cleopatra daybed
Auping’s Cleopatra combines an open steel structure and wooden end details, giving a single bed a restrained appearance within a room used throughout the day.
Design
Colour Wood side tables
Scholten & Baijings’s Colour Wood side tables layer grain, translucent colour and printed pattern. Their Japanese production history gives small timber sections a new visual role.
Historic object
Commode 2020.371
Tiny wooden nails explain the sweeping curves of Pietro Piffetti’s Turin commode: a close look at veneer, fastening and the cabinetmaker’s own furniture.
Historic object
Congo armchair, Centraal Museum 26422
Theo Ruth’s Congo armchair makes the meeting of its two major assemblies part of the design. Centraal Museum’s 1953 example gives the story a precise anchor.
Technique
Conserving plastic furniture
Why conserving an inflatable chair or beanbag means understanding skins, seams and fillers—and deciding which evidence matters.
Design
Construction Lamp Floor
Joost van Bleiswijk’s Construction Lamp turns visible screws, joints and a structural base into the visual subject of a floor light.
Event
Copenhagen Cabinetmakers' Guild Exhibitions
Learn how collectors use Copenhagen Cabinetmakers' Guild exhibition years, designer-maker pairings and catalogues without mistaking a model history for object provenance.
Design
Corona Chair
See how Poul M. Volther's Corona Chair divides one reclining body into four elliptical support zones, turning gaps and a spring-steel spine into the design.
Historic object
Cow Chair unicum, Centraal Museum 28635
Niels van Eijk’s Cow Chair asks the hide itself to hold a furniture shape. Centraal Museum’s 1997 unicum anchors a story about changing a material’s usual role.