Outdoor Chairs We Love

I didn’t inherit much from my grandparents. They were immigrants with quite a bit more on their minds than designer furniture, but somehow they had a set of Russel Wright folding chairs. I remember eyeing them in my grandmother’s garage behind her two freezers and her outdoor stove that she used for frying. I begged for them. She thought I had lost my mind and gave them to me along with four plates of frozen piroshkies and a large Napoleon (in a case I got hungry on the ride home).

I love those chairs and had them powder coated aqua (to match a Bauer oil jar I have). I think fondly of my grandmother when I see them and marvel at the fact that they are close to 70 years old and still perfect. Which proves the point that quality furniture is, in fact, worth it.

We are always on the look out for beautiful vintage chairs at Potted and when the patina is this beautiful, the key is to seal them with a clear matte or satin finish sealer so you get a little kick but you stop the rust.

A beautiful patina is like a work of art…it would be a crime to make it look perfectly new again but if that’s what you want, you must be careful.

Especially with thinner chairs like these amazing wire ones. The problem is that in order to powder coat anything, you first have to sandblast them and if they have already been damaged, sometimes the sandblasting just does them in. We have lost countless chairs this way. Always really look at every part of a chair before you submit it to harsh sandblasting.

Often in our hunt for vintage chairs we find remarkable ones that we want to “re-imagine.” Okay, we’ll just admit that it’s a fancy way of saying we want to remake them, but nobody else is and it seems like such a shame to see such great designs going to waste like this one that we have no idea where it came from but we’ve dubbed it The Pelican Chair.

And this has been the best one yet, what we call the Clam Chair I saw at a party where the host told me she had pulled it out of a dumpster. I asked her if I could borrow it and gave her back two. We then found out it was actually a Salterini chair that had been out of production for years and people started scooping it up.

Compact but surprisingly comfortable, the Clam Chair is one of those retro pieces that works really well with our funky eclectic style.

The chair craze really started for us with the Egg Chair, shown here at a customer’s home in an assortment of colors. We were getting them from Mexico and it was a pain in the neck because we never knew when we were going to get them and we couldn’t control the colors and then we discovered someone locally who could make whatever we wanted.

And then we got to sell the Hoop Chairs too.

He was also making what he called The Sling Chair (I don’t know who the designer is).

And this very cool X Chair (photo by Bethany Nauert)

These are called Biscayne Chairs by the company that sells them, but they are really just “re-imaginings” of Woodard Sculptura chairs in a glorious red. With this wood table, they are fantastic.

Now we are selling the heavenly Bend Seating.

With their intricate welding details and beautiful lines…

I have a feeling these are going to be pieces our grandchildren are going to be begging us to give to them. We have them in stock. Come see for yourself.

Tags: Bend Seating, Biscayne Chair, Clam Chair, egg chair, Hoop Chair, Russel Wright, Salterini, vintage

This entry was posted on Friday, July 6th, 2012 at 8:02 am and is filed under Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.