This auction is now finished. If you are interested in consigning in future auctions, please contact the specialist department. If you have queries about lots purchased in this auction, please contact customer services. ALL BIDDERS MUST AGREE THAT THEY HAVE READ AND UNDERSTOOD BONHAMS' CONDITIONS OF SALE AND AGREE TO BE BOUND BY THEM, AND AGREE TO PAY THE BUYER'S PREMIUM AND ANY OTHER CHARGES MENTIONED IN THE NOTICE TO BIDDERS. THIS AFFECTS THE BIDDERS LEGAL RIGHTS.If you have any complaints or questions about the Conditions of Sale, please contact your nearest customer services team. Buyers' Premium and Charges For all Sales categories excluding Wine, Coins & Medals and Motor Cars and Motorcycles:A successful bidder at this sale will be required to pay Bonhams 1793 Limited ("Bonhams") a premium calculated as follows: 25% on the first £100,000 of the hammer price20% on the excess of £100,001 and up to £2,000,000 of the hammer price12% on the excess of £2,000,001 of the hammer priceVAT at 20% will be payable on the amount of the premium.
The premium is payable for the services to be provided by Bonhams in the Buyer's Agreement which is contained in the catalogue for this Sale and for the opportunity to bid for the Lot at the Sale. Payment in advance: by cash, cheque with banker's card, credit card, bank draft or traveller's cheque.Payment at collection: by credit or debit card.Credit card charges: a surcharge of 2% is applicable when using Mastercard, Visa and overseas debit cards. For information and estimates on domestic and international shipping as well as export licences please contact Bonhams Shipping Department.Ron Arad said he "hardly designed anything" when creating his readymade Rover Chair, which is next up in our festive A-Zdvent calendar. The Rover Chair was produced using discarded seats from vehicles made by the now-defunct British car company of the same name. The seat is set to make a return to production as an updated version next year. Israeli-born designer Ron Arad made his first Rover Chair in 1981 after he grew tired of his job at an architect's practice in north London.
"I went to a scrapyard behind the Roundhouse on a mission to find a car seat that I would make a domestic chair out of," Arad told Dezeen. "I knew I had to choose one [model of car] and the Rover won because it was a nice fitting leather chair that was fixed to the car at four points so it was easy for me to fix it onto the frame." Dezeen Book of Interviews: Ron Arad features in our new book, which is on sale nowArad adapted tubular steel Kee Klamps that are commonly used in milking stalls to make the frame for the chair, which features curving sections that form the armrests clamped to horizontal supports. "I hardly designed anything – it was all readymade," Arad added. "I felt it was more to do with [Marcel] Duchamp and found objects than it was with [Jean] Prouvé or [Marcel] Breuer and with furniture design, but I was wrong because I once found a photograph of a chair by Prouvé that looks amazingly like it." The first chairs were manufactured by Arad at his studio in Covent Garden and Rolf Fehlbaum, the chairman of design brand Vitra, was one of the first people to turn up and buy one.
A year later Arad said fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier knocked on the door and asked to buy six. "After that it became – by my standards in those days – a bestseller and I couldn't get enough of them so I employed two people with a van to scour the country's scrapyards and get every Rover seat they could get their hands on," Arad recalled. He worked with a local upholsterer specialised in automotive trimming to renovate the seats and continued producing the chair under his One Off label until 1989. "It was so successful it was boring so I declared the last hundred," Arad said. "I kept the first two and they were in the house and my daughters grew up on them and the cat sat on them. Then, when they were exhibited at my show No Discipline at the Pompidou Centre I was told off for touching my own chair without wearing white gloves." The earliest versions were made using red seats from the Rover P6 and the designer claimed he thought all Rover seats were red before eventually discovering the more common beige and black versions.
"I've noticed in auctions that a red one fetches twice as much as any other colour," added Arad, who is one of the only collectible contemporary designers on the art market according to French auction house Artcurial. The designer said that he is currently developing a new version of the Rover chair for Italian brand Moroso, which could be ready in time for next year's Milan furniture fair in April. "It's going to be different - it's going to be like the new Mini to the old Mini, like the new Fiat 500 to the old Fiat 500," explained Arad. "At first glance you'll say 'Ah, there's a Rover chair' and at second glance you'll see differences." "I have to have a really good reason to redesign it not as a readymade, but it has to have a lot of the original Rover chair. It's a very interesting exercise." Dezeen is publishing an A to Z of iconic chairs to count down the days until Christmas. Catch up with the list so far »I'm not very good at keeping promises to myself," sighs Ron Arad, designer-maker of sculptural furniture.
We're sitting in his Chalk Farm studio surrounded by prototype sofas, chairs and tables in his signature curvilinear style and Lego colours. "One promise I made to myself was that I was never going to do a rocking chair again. And another was that we were never going to show at the Milan Furniture Fair again."Arad broke both promises in spectacular style in April, when he presented a new seven-piece collection called Bodyguards. The very-limited-edition metallic objects included, yes, rocking chairs. Made from aluminium so highly polished that it becomes a mirror, the objects could potentially function as chairs or chaises-longues. Others are unapologetically pure sculptures on which no human posterior could (or would want to) rest. "I think I have, over my career, increased the population of rocking chairs in the world - not a bad thing, but I did say to myself, no more rocking chairs. And then, when I sat down to think about new technology I'm using to blow aluminium, I started drawing a rocking chair."
That sleek silver chair, a hollow hemisphere of futuristic metal, doesn't just rock back and forth but swivels every which way - a motion that Arad terms "omnidirectional". The show came after a self-imposed exile from the famed furniture fair. Milan, he thinks, "is for furniture buyers". Although he produces numerous designs in industrial quantities for mega-manufacturers such as Kartell, Vitra and Moroso, these latest "studio pieces" are displayed in a manner closer to artworks in a gallery. In fact, Arad is preparing to show his work in a full-scale retrospective show next year at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Despite his resolutions, last year he was "seduced" back to Milan by the offer of a glamorous venue belonging to Dolce & Gabbana, whose fame in fashion just about equals Arad's renown in the world of design. "Well, that shows you what promises mean," he comments dryly. The first D&G-sponsored Ron Arad show, in 2006, called Blo-Glo, was protected by the fashion house's black-clad security guards.
His friends mocked him for having so many "bodyguards" protecting his honeycomb chairs - hence the name for this year's offering. "But also, one of the pieces looks very much like a torso. And once something gets a name, the name begins to affect it. And the 'Bodyguards' are huge. But then you cut them and on the inside you reveal another colour inside. They are very labour-intensive." Arad was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1951. He initially trained to be an architect, moving to London in 1973 to study at the Architectural Association. At his first job in Hampstead, Arad realised he didn't enjoy working for others. One afternoon, instead of going back to the office after lunch, he wandered into a scrap yard, picked out two abandoned car seats, some metal frames and experimented with fitting the parts together to make armchairs. The Rover Chair (1981) would become an icon of the decade. The same year Arad set up his own design studio with Caroline Thorman in Covent Garden, One Off Ltd, developing his aesthetic that combined objets trouves and hi-tech materials.
One of those original Rover Chairs is propped up on bricks in the middle of Arad's studio today. "The British car industry was going down the drain at the time," he recalls, "but this seat was incredibly comfortable. It made sense to do it, and it connected with my interest in ready-made art. Now, some 25 years later, we are redesigning it. It's going to be like the new Mini to the old Mini, the new Beetle to the old Beetle. It's going to be made by Vitra. For the first time I'm designing a retro piece." Arad has always striven to be contemporary. Other stand-out pieces of his early career were the Transformer (1981), an airtight PVC envelope resembling a shiny duvet which the user can mould to fit their body; the Bookworm shelf (1994), a flexible length of raw steel that can be curled into numerous curvy shapes and mounted on the wall, and which was developed into a bestselling product in semi-translucent plastic by Kartell; the Well-Tempered Chair (1986), a cartoonish armchair cut from tempered steel but oddly comfortable.
At that time in London, Arad recalls, there was no furniture-design scene to speak of. "It forced me to invent my profession." As the big Italian furniture manufacturers began to queue up to produce his surrealist designs in mass quantities, Arad became a household name. For Alessi, he has designed everything from watches to cocktail shakers. In the Nineties he was commissioned for numerous restaurant and retail interiors, most famously the Belgo beer-and-mussels chain; in 2001 it was the technology floor of Selfridges in London and, in 2003, the interior of the Yohji Yamamoto store in Tokyo. So recognisable is Arad's aesthetic now that he recently found himself the victim of counterfeiting on a vast scale. He's seen Rover Chairs for sale, he says, that are fakes. "When I was in Hong Kong, a contact of mine told me that there are 11 factories doing my 'Vac' chair, and would I like to visit one. So we went out by boat to mainland China. It was very weird. There were Eames chairs and my chairs.
I sat down with the guy who ran the factory and told him that I wasn't angry with him, because of course he's creating wealth and employment. But the people in the West who deal with these fakes aren't nice people and why don't we try and get you to do some original designs instead. He said that would be his dream. So that's something I'm working on - me and globalism." Another issue that troubles Arad is the attempts made by others to try to define his work, often asking of furniture, "Is it art?" According to the art market, it is. Furniture by living designers such as Marc Newson is now fetching sums approaching a million dollars at auction. The price boom is partially driven by American collectors who have covered their walls in art and are now looking for equally exclusive furniture. Spawning fairs, specialist galleries and awards worldwide, "Design Art" is the newly minted term for nominally functional objects that are treated by curators, collectors and press with the same reverence usually reserved for painting and sculpture.