Just got a late Christmas present from craigslist last night; a pair of Form chairs by Torbjorn Afdal for Bruksbo. As usual, my initial plans to resell are now in doubt after getting a chance to sit in them and better understand the overall quality of construction. I may have to rotate these into the current house layout and put some other ones up for sale. The overall quality of these chairs are excellent. For those of you who have felt the tank-like sturdiness of the Afdal/Bruksbo Krobo bench/table design, these chairs have that same sturdy construction feel to them, except in a much more fluid, elegant, and lighter form. While I have seen other online examples marked, these ones are not. Another example of the quality is the seat, expertly upholstered in tight black leather (not vinyl), which has the nicest underside I've ever seen in a dining chair. The curved plywood seat is thicker than normal (~1/2" or 12mm), and has what appears to be teak veneer on the bottom face. Two rows of staples for the leather are so carefully installed that they almost resemble metal stitches. Quite an effort/expense for a view of the chair that is almost never seen. Both chairs have an additional piece of wood for the chair support, which appears to be part of the original construction, even if it doesn't really fit in with the design concept of the wood frame. On a tangent note, I hope no one minds, but I've been creating threads like this recently where no existing relevant thread exists, instead of posting in the last-thing-you've-acquired list. I've always found these focused threads more useful when searching for info (rather than isolated mentions in larger threads), especially when others then add onto it.
<img class="wpforo-default-image-att
Very handsome chairs! And lucky you that they're leather and not vinyl. (I kind of hate black vinyl these days.)
Could the underside of the chair be maybe mahagony veneer? it looks like lauan to me in that photo. I've seen lauan plywood on Danish chair seats. Beech or birch is more typical but lauan is out there.
The staples are indeed done very neatly but I would bet that this did not require any extra effort or expense on the part of the upholsterer. If you do a fair amount of stapling, you get into a rhythm and it becomes second nature to do neat lines of staples. Also, on a chair like this with welt, the outer line of staples serves as a tacking strip for the welt so that it is anchored as close to the edge as possible, then the 2nd row of staples keeps the seam allowance of the welt from hanging down in an unsightly way. Often there is a cambric cover over all of this but there's not a lot of room left on this for yet anther row of staples. So they chose to do it neatly and just leave it.
Spanky, as usual, you are right on the money. After posting, I noticed the welt detail on the bottom edge of the seat. While there may have been a few manufacturers that did this, these chairs are the first time I've come across this detail. And I am no wood expert, so that bottom face veneer could be what you theorized.
Sdr, I just figured out tonight how to rotate a photo in my iphone/iPad library, so I won't be posting any more sideways shots.
Just stumbled across this photo online of Form chairs that have a slightly different construction than every other one I've seen before. The two detail variations that I can see from this one photo are:
1) instead of the flat Y backrest slat, it is a flat "paperclip" backrest. I think the Y looks more elegant.
2) instead of 2 splice pieces for the joint between each arm and the backrest, there are multiple (5?).
Tough for me to tell what the wood type is, maybe stained beech?
My guess is these were early versions before refinements were made for greater production. If only there was a more convenient word for that . . .
If you need any help, please contact us at – info@designaddict.com