Coquille Chair

On a symbolic level, our design was inspired by one of the best-loved paintings of the Italian Renaissance: Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. It depicts the goddess of love being wafted to shore on a giant scallop shell (a coquille, in French). The scallop is both a delicious delicacy and a popular design motif. Used since prehistoric times as ornaments, jewellery and sometimes even money, seashells have a long history as elements in architecture and design. Scallop shells are also a symbol of pilgrimage and life’s journey: the story starts, like Venus’s tale, when the shell touches the shore. Our chair evokes this feeling of arrival and hopeful new beginnings.

The original model for Coquille was the classic modernist bent-wood and rattan bistro chair. How could we reinterpret this iconic design for the present time, adapting its natural lines and intuitive, organic form? Our partner in this project, Lensvelt furniture company, was mindful of the pandemic and wanted a chair that could be used outdoors as well as inside. This preference for versatility suggested tubular steel – a material loved by modernists since Marcel Breuer. Of course, the shiny reflective metal also echoes the fluid quality of water – perfect for giving form to our shell chair.

Using steel, we developed a design that is a total object, a one-piece sculpture. The generous back with its elegantly curving ribs sits atop a swivel base that rests on four legs, each with a boldly curving profile. There were many technical challenges in developing the design, which were solved with great ingenuity by Lensvelt R&D and the skilled artisans of the Italian manufacturers. Not least the extreme degree of bending needed for the uniquely shaped legs – requiring holes to be punched in them, which were later refilled. Getting the legs right was the key to our design. Visually they extend the flowing form of the chair body into a single, infinitely flowing line. The upholstered seat then sits in the center of the chair, like a pearl in an oyster.

With a fine collection of architects’ chairs of our own, it was inevitable that Powerhouse would produce our own one day. After all, every architect wants to design a chair. Why? Probably because a chair can so perfectly distill the essence of an architect’s style. A chair brings our work to a wider public, and it creates a uniquely intimate relationship with those who use it. Coquille, like our buildings, is classical yet innovative. It sculpts space using a modernist vocabulary of proportion, scale and geometry, which it adapts in a fresh and contemporary way. It’s a perfect fusion of form and function, and it has a powerful presence. It is simply elegant. More than just a chair, it’s a kind of microcosm of a Powerhouse Company building.