For Denise Chua, founder of I Got a Thing for Chairs (@igotathingforchairs), a chair doesn’t necessarily have to be comfortable to be good. Sometimes beauty wins. Sometimes a piece of furniture can be strange, impractical or simply for fun. But put that same chair in a living room and the rules change entirely.
During London Design Festival, we sat down with Denise at The Standard, London to talk about form vs function, furniture as an expression of personality, the forgotten importance of smell, and how the way we arrange chairs can shape the way we interact with one another.
What should a great chair make you feel within the first ten seconds of sitting in it?
I’m going to say something horrible, but I don’t actually care that much if the chair is nice to sit in. Sometimes, for me, it really is about the design… But if it’s a chair or sofa in your living room, then you need to feel almost like you’re on a cloud. A little cloud. I’m a big believer that when it comes to the sofa in your living room, that’s where all the best things happen. From belly laughs with your friends until 3am to going through a breakup and needing somewhere to sleep.
Would you design for posture, presence or personality first?
Personality. I genuinely love walking into someone’s house and seeing their personality through their furniture or their choice of interiors. There’s nothing nicer than that. It’s almost like you’re walking into a museum of that person — their life, what they like, the things they’re into. There was recently CCTV footage of someone in a gallery trying to sit on a diamond-encrusted chair and breaking it. I loved it because, for some people, the whole idea of form over function doesn’t even register: a chair is for sitting on…
How does the context of a space — a hotel lobby versus a private home, for example — change the way a chair behaves?
That’s a great question. I was going to say that in a hotel lobby it needs to be more comfortable than something in your home, but actually maybe it’s the other way around. When people choose objects for their own homes, they probably want them to be more functional. In a hotel, you can lean much more heavily on aesthetics. But I’m going to sound like a broken record: I’m a big advocate of just making things as crazy and dysfunctional as possible.
There’s that chair that looks like blades of grass…
That one is actually very comfortable! But think about something like that — how fun would that be to have in your house? It wasn’t just made around function; it was made to have a bit of fun, to bring a bit of childhood into it. You decide how you sit in it. You could have friends in there, you could lie in it. That’s one of the great things about design: you can actually make things as crazy as your imagination allows you to.
What is the most overlooked sensory detail when people choose seating?
If it’s vintage: smell. Don’t miss out on that. You can sit down on a chair that looks beautiful and suddenly realise it smells bad. It can be musky and you think: something has happened here.
What’s your favourite chair at The Standard, London?
I think I’ll stick with the ones we’re sitting in. I just really like what it looks like. It transports me into a little cottage somewhere. I think the structure of it is very well made, and I actually just really like a wooden chair.
I love the wooden chair too. There’s something about its sharp edges that almost feels like brutalism in wood. You could imagine the same chair made out of concrete.
That’s interesting. I’ve never thought of it like that. To me, it specifically feels really soft.
How does seating influence the way people interact with one another?
In a lot of ways. I think culture is a really interesting part of it. Think about going on a date: do you sit next to each other, or across from each other? In Western society it’s very normal, especially early on, to sit across from one another. Whereas in Brazil, for example, it’s very normal to immediately sit next to each other. The settings and the seating are designed around that too.
I’m from the Netherlands, and you cannot get people to sit next to each other on a date for the life of them. So seating is culturally important, but you can also design spaces in ways that encourage certain kinds of interaction. Bring back the conversation pit. Bring back things that almost force you to start communicating with people you might not know or wouldn’t otherwise speak to.
Think about sitting in a group of four seats on the Eurostar. How often do you end up chatting to the person across from you or next to you simply because the arrangement has created that possibility? But, again, whether that works is very dependent on what is culturally acceptable in a particular place. If I were sitting in a four-seater in Japan, for example, the same arrangement wouldn’t necessarily mean anyone was going to talk to me.
The furniture can create the opportunity, but culture still determines what we do with it.
Conversation originally held in The Library Lounge in The Standard, London for International Women’s History Month, bringing together a panel of women across the creative industries to reflect on generosity, exchange, and the communities that shape the paths of women in art and design. As part of the evening, we hosted a charity raffle in the spirit of reciprocity with 100% of proceeds donated to @southallblacksisters.
