The Vitra design classics ahead of their time.

Vitra has well and truly landed at Living Edge and with it comes a chance to brush up on your history of twentieth-century design. From Prouvé to Panton, Vitra manufactures some of the most covetable and iconic pieces by the experimental designers who explored new forms in furniture.

Once ground breaking, now timeless, these pieces have entered the annals of furniture design and sit seamlessly alongside Living Edge’s existing collection of classic and contemporary pieces.

SHOP ALL VITRA

Charles Eames & Eero Saarinen

Organic Chair

Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen’s Organic Chair marked a new generation in furniture design and production. Eames and Saarinen collaborated on ‘new forms’ of furniture by experimenting with new technologies and developed a sculptural chair – comprising moulded wood veneer and foam rubber – for New York’s Museum of Modern Art “Organic Design in Home Furnishings” competition in 1941. Well ahead of its time, the chair didn’t actually go into serial production until 2006 when Vitra brought the classic to life.

Isamu Noguchi

Isamu Noguchi was a Japanese American craftsman, sculptor, designer and architect. Dedicating his life to artistic experimentation, Noguchi’s work blurs the lines of design and sculpture, integrates a wide range of materials, and is characterised by simplicity and organic abstraction.

Noguchi Table
Noguchi’s dining table is exceptionally elegant with a spiralling rod base like a sculptural cyclone. “Everything is sculpture,” said Isamu Noguchi. “Any material, any idea without hindrance born into space, I consider sculpture.”

Noguchi Coffee Table
Noguchi created his critically acclaimed glass and walnut coffee table in 1945. He sought to make sculpture useful in everyday life and the coffee tables organic forms are reminiscent of his biomorphic sculptures in bronze and marble of the period.

Verner Panton

Panton Chair

The Panton Chair was the first chair to be manufactured completely out of plastic in one single piece, and its cantilevered and anthropomorphic shape is designed to follow the contours of the body. Conceived by Verner Panton in 1960 and produced by Vitra in 1967, the Panton Chair was the first single-injection moulded chair. It has been through several production phases since that time and is now produced in accordance with Panton’s original conception: durable, dyed-through plastic with a lustrous matte finish.

Jean Prouvé

Jean Prouvé trained as a metal artisan before moving into furniture design but he always considered himself an engineer and constructor rather than modern designer. Believing there was no difference in construction between a piece of furniture and a house, Prouvé developed a “constructional philosophy” based on functionality and rational fabrication.