Niko Kralj  

Hi.

Can’t resist time share this story with you guys.

A month ago or so, I bought a chair on eBay that looked like the Rex Chair by Niko Kralj and had a Thonet paper label on it. It was not too expensive and a local pick up so I decided to give it a go. 

Kralj has only made designs for one company, Stol Kamnik, and that the chair did not look like anything I knew. I have a book about Kralj it was not there either.

I decided to what I do best: bothering people I don’t know to ask questions about furniture. I contacted the person that organized a Kralj exhibition in Ljubljana design museum some years ago.

No answer... until yesterday!

It turns out that the chair I bought is an early and very rare version of the Rex chair and that the person from Ljubljana design museum that answered to my mail never saw it except on picture. By the way, she is also one the authors of a reference book about the designer.

After exchanging a few emails, it looks like it could be a chair that Kralj designed for Thonet but was not sold in Yugoslavia. The point here is that before MY chair there was no known evidence that Kralj designed anything for Thonet. I have contacted Thonet to see if they know anything about that chair. I’ll let you know if you guys are interested.

First time in my life that a museum offers to buy anything from me to display it as a part of their collection. Needless to say I am pretty excited about this whole story!