Art of the Seat: 15 Stunning Sculptural Chair Designs
I hope you're ready to have a seat, because these 15 stunning sculptural chair designs are going to knock you off your feet.
If not their looks and engineering, then certainly their price tags.
Note: All 15 sculptural chairs are priced as they were at printing on January 6, 2022. Pricing, and availability, are subject to change.
Giant Red King Crab Chair
Design Toscano's Giant Red King Crab Chair is going to be sit-down hit with ocean lovers, aquarium enthusiasts, and owners of crab shacks. Those who won't love chillin' on a big ol' crab chair: lobsters. They could just claw this crab's beady eyes out.
Lobsters are the most delicious and coveted crustacean of all, but where is their recognition? Where is their tribute in the form of a piece of sculptural furniture? Lobsters hope anyone who buys the Giant Red King Crab Chair takes one seat in it and realizes they've gotten imitation krab instead.
Do Hit Chair - DIY Sledgehammer Seating
I can't say I've ever seen a chair with a "Do Not Hit" sign or theme, but that doesn't make this Do Hit Chair any less interesting to me. It's like, you know, Just Do Hit.
In the spirit of anger- and stress-busting smash rooms, the Marijn van der Poll Do Hit Chair design for Droog arrives as a stainless steel box and sledgehammer. it's your choice as co-designer where the DIY seating goes from there.
Skull Armchair
Another supervillain yahtzee! This black skull armchair was the one prop missing from my master plan to raise an army of babies and eliminate all cats and bike lanes from my township! The only downside is that it does not appear to swivel, which could pose a problem when it's time to face Lance Armstrong and the Calicos, and I strain my neck trying to whip around for the big reveal of my eeeevil visage.
Carpet Chair
When you're a genie, or Cypriot designer Stelios Mousarris, you don't just know how to make magic carpets fly, you know how to bend and fold them into a creative and elegant seating option to use when you're not in the air. Mousarris designed the Carpet Chair in collaboration with artist Jan Blythe, and it's molded from an actual Persian carpet. Buyers have a choice of pattern and style, which Mousarris and Blythe need a few months to weave by hand and then finesse into the floating illusion you see here.
MANET French Fry Easy Chair
MANET says, "Sitting can be playful," which is all the reason I need to buy one of their order-o'-fries-looking Easy Chairs. To prove to my wife that I'm not just lounging around on my ass, I'm being playful.
Though speaking of ass and playful, how playful are those protruding French fries going to be with my ass when I do a butt flop on the MANET? They're soft and give way easily, right?
Scorpion Chair
Ah, just the Scorpion Chair I've been looking for. Elegant. Subtle. A real complement to my Death Stalker scorpion blade arm gauntlet. And, dude. It's really gonna tie the room together. I can already see myself sitting beneath the spherical tip of the scorpion's curved oak tail on a stormy night, glass of scotch in one hand, gauntleted arm stroking my cat Zanzibar with the other.
Antler Chair
Someone should hire Self-Regenerative Wax Lamp and Antler Chair creator, Merve Kahraman, to design the next Olympics Opening Ceremonies or, like, my living room. Her brain is a giant KFC bucket of ideas. All of them at least as good as the Colonel's chicken.
The anthropomorphic piece of seating, obviously centerpieced by its sick set of antlers rising from behind to frame chair occupants' heads, also buckifies itself with carved hoof legs, a textured paint finish that mimics deer fur, and specially crafted patterned leather.
The Balls Lounger
Though I am not a tennis fan, given that the opening line of Animi Causa's product copy for their balls lounger is, "The Feel Deluxe is made of 120 soft and extremely pleasant balls," I am very happy that it's the tennis kind of balls that they look like. Because this infinitely malleable piece of furniture seems as if it may be the most comfortable place on earth to lay my weary head, outside of Halle Berry's lap, and I would hate for unsavory anatomical associations to keep me from it.
Gravity Stool
Dutch designer Jolan van der Wiel not only created these Fraggle-Rock-meets-Super-Mario-Brothers-meets-Gotham-City hybrids, he also created the simple wood-framed machine used to forge them. Summoning the forces of gravity and magnets, van der Wiel places a secret sauce of liquid plastic compounds and iron fillings into a magnet-lined bowl, and then watches as 15 additional magnets attract the mixture, drawing it upward, and allowing nature to take shape.
Resultant stools are exact replicas of the magnetic pull. They're van der Wiel's way of giving an otherwise invisible field opacity, structure, tangible beauty, and an organic birth. Kind of like when the rest of us use witchcraft to manifest the ghosts haunting our furnace rooms.
Maximo Riera Animal Chair Collection
When it comes to Maximo Riera's Animal Chairs, be it the octopus or the elephant, the walrus in matte black or the bullfrog in electric green, the word "showstopper" is an understatement. These pieces' detail and biological accuracy are absolutely breathtaking, and I bet if the real version of any one of these animals saw its Riera Chair counterpart, it would hump it immediately.
Porky Hefer Animal Chair Collection
Porky Hefer has a more whimsical take on Animal Chairs than Maximo Riera, but his designs are no less unique and stunning. In his 2018 Endangered Collection, shown above, Hefer merges imagination and reality into an array of seating options this dude would be stoked to swing from.
The Endangered Exhibition includes an orangutan, a polar bear, a sloth, a blue whale, and a great white shark, all fabricated from eco-friendly and recycled materials, and handmade by artisans in Cape Town. Techniques used to bring the animal chairs to life include crochet, felting, stitching, embroidery, and cuddling.
Urchin Bean Bag Chair
The Urchin Bean Bag Chair. Just in case your BDSM bordello is missing a touch of magic from the sea. Designed by Ursula Blackman Cruz, this leather-upholstered lounger is certainly a standout in home decor. Some might call it a conversation piece, but when I look at it, all I hear is those monster black spikes barking, "A little less conversation, a little more action, please!" And I know exactly where they want to stick that action. Ouch.
Restless Rocking Chair
Turn yourself into a life-size, real-life Weeble with the Restless Rocking Chair, a whimsical piece of kinetic furniture from Czech designer Karel Matejka. Though termed a "rocking chair" for simplicity, the Restless armchair rocks like a roly-poly, in all directions, plus spins 'round and 'round on its axis, rather than sticking to a simple forward-back sway like a typical rocker.
Carbon Fiber Phantom Chair
The Phantom Chair is made of a single giant sheet of carbon fiber, molded into a shell that looks like it's draped over a fine chaise underneath. Like something my Aunt Jan bought at Ashley Furniture, but is so paranoid someone will scratch, soil, or spill on that she keeps it all covered up with a grungy old blanket, thereby defeating the purpose of buying a new chair to begin with.
Though the luxe, leathery sheen of the Phantom's carbon fiber "cover" is obviously way nicer than a grungy old blanket...and probably every piece of furniture in my Aunt Jan's house combined.
Dedon Rilly Collection Cocoon Chair
A few hours of respite in Dedon's Rilly Collection Cocoon Chair, and you'll emerge as rejuvenated and transformed as a summer butterfly. Or at least, like, a little more relaxed and less sunburnt. With slatted geometric tan lines.