The Corner Chair has been developed in the Deadgood Studio by our talented Designer Vicki Leach whose starting point was to develop a shape with a ninety degree angle to the rear, taking inspiration from the ‘converstion’ chairs of the Victorian era.

The main challenge was to maintain this rear angle whilst also providing lumbar comfort for the user, which dictated how the form of the chair developed. This development process involved an awful lot of time spent learning new ways of building shapes on Solidworks. It was quite restricting as to what shapes we could develop but introducing the form of an irregular pentagon opened up the comfort and configuration options.

An incline on the arm allowed us to achieve a comfortable elbow height and also worked well to improve the
‘conversation’ feature for the tessellated seating patterns.

We researched various proportions of chairs to get the perfect dimensions for a comfortable sit and found the
optimal thickness we needed whilst also keeping the overall shape as slim as possible. Our next decision to make was how to construct the chair. We researched plywood and fibreglass shell options to create the shape, however we wanted to keep the costs low and use more of a traditional approach to the contemporary form. Chairs such as the Coconut Chair by George Nelson utilised the fibreglass method to great affect but we
wanted to stay true to the process and to our upholsterers traditional capabilities. This is where we opted
to create a bespoke frame similar to the Love and Capsule Collection, utilising CNC manufactured FSC
certified plywood.

After developing the shape with the new construction method we took this to the master upholstery designer Steve Hawkins with whom we have worked on numerous projects. Having built a solid relationship with him, we knew we could rely on his expertise to create this new piece. Unfortunately Steve was left baffled and couldn’t quite get the same shape from his own approach. True to his ethos of not letting a computer program dictate the shape though, Steve offered to teach us some of his 30 years of frame making experience and oversaw the development of the frame in house. This became a real challenge as the form we required is technically challenging to upholster. We had to develop the frame with as thin a shell as possible to maintain the slim profile we were looking for. After a great deal of head scratching we finally got there though and believe we’ve now created a chair with broad market appeal.

Finally, we opted for a ‘retrofit’ pedestal base so we could keep the options open for the our clients when specifying the chair, allowing for static or rotating bases that can be either powder coated or supplied in a brushed alluminium finish.