Barcelona Chair

A chair drawn for a king and queen who never sat in it. Mies van der Rohe designed the Barcelona chair in 1929 as seating for the Spanish royal couple at the German Pavilion of the International Exposition in Barcelona, and by Knoll's telling the throne went unused.

Most of the labour is in the cushions rather than the frame. Each leather Barcelona chair is upholstered from a single cowhide, cut into 40 individual squares that are hand-welted and hand-tufted with buttons, which is why the finished surface reads as one continuous plane instead of a grid of joins. Inside, the standard fill is polyurethane foam wrapped in Dacron fiberfill, with a relaxed option using a softer-density foam, which gives a little more under you. Straps of belting leather carry the cushions across the frame, so the support is leather on leather.

The frame is the famous crisscross, a shape Knoll traces back to ancient Roman campaign chairs. The pavilion originals were bolted and chrome-plated, with cushions in ivory pigskin. Today the steel arrives hand-buffed in polished chrome, in grade 304 stainless polished to a mirror, or in an ultra-matte onyx finish that takes the shine out of the geometry entirely.

The paper trail matters with this one, because the silhouette has been copied for decades. Mies mentored Florence Knoll while she studied architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and in 1953 he granted Knoll the production rights; the company has built the chair to his standards ever since. Since the mid-1990s his signature has been stamped into the back right of the frame beside the Knoll logo, which is the quickest way to tell an original from something that only looks like one.