Our dining kitchen has always felt a bit dark, despite the fact that it’s next to doors that open out into a garden room, so we were looking for something to lighten it up and decided that new dining room chairs would do the job. So after lots of looking around, a trip to John Lewis where they stock the originals at £339 each and then spending ages on the Cult Furniture website, we settled on the look of the Eames chairs but were a bit put off by the price. So after loads more research, we settled on the Replica Eames Chairs. So we renovated the kitchen diner with a Canadian brick effect wallpaper, prepared and painted the top of the old table from oak to a country cream colour and added the chairs. With the condition the dining room chairs were in prior to the upgrade, almost anything would have been an improvement. But I would honestly say to anyone interested in buying these; they are a bargain to say the least at £58.99 for a set of four Eames style chairs in white.
The quirky, modern edge of these chairs has completely changed the appearance of the room itself. The chairs tuck themselves nicely under the dining room table meaning that the rooms feels more spacious, in turn providing much more opportunity for the natural light to pass through the garden room into the dining area. The light that now floods through the room has transformed its look and feel. As a bit of extra good news, the Polypropylene seat is UV protected to stop the clear panel from discolouring when left in direct sunlight; so, if they do get left in the sunshine, you shouldn’t have to worry about causing any damage! Finally, the whole look and feel of the chairs feels every bit as good as the originals and for me, make this set ridiculous value and worth every penny.Interior design: 10 of the best kitchen stools and chairs ARE YOU sitting comfortably? If not, treat yourself to some of these Find a comfortable stool that will brighten your kitchen [GETTY]
From funky neon stools to modern metal chairs and wooden country seats, we have a great selection of breakfast bar furniture to brighten up your kitchen.Choose the perfect stool for your home [PH]1. Wire barstool, £110, Furnish (furnish.co.uk)3. Croft Chair, £212, John Lewis of Hungerford (0700 278 4726, john-lewis.co.uk) Treat yourself to a unique and comfortable stool [PH]4. Pink stool, £21, Vertbaudet (0844 842 0000, vertbaudet.co.uk) 6. )Pick the perfect for your taste from a colourful trend chair to a raft bar stool [PH]7. General Store Stool, £75 (0800 636262, sainsburys.co.uk) 8. Green Trend chair, £60 for a set of two, Next (0844 844 8939, next.co.uk)9. Raft Bar Stool, £350.40, by Norm Architects at Naken (01502 715064, naken.co.uk)The Stool 60 Giveaway. Sign up for our emails and a chance to win this ingenious stackable stool.“Rare is the human backside that hasn’t found solace and support in Mr. Day’s most famous creation”, thus, with just a touch of music hall sauciness, begins Bruce Weber his obituary to the British designer Robin Day in the New York Times from November 20th 2010, before continuing, “a molded polypropylene shell fastened to an enameled bent tubular steel base that has become familiar seating in schools
, churches, offices, auditoriums, home patios, kitchens, dens, bedrooms and basements around the world.” Yet however ubiquitous Robin Day’s Poly side chair for Hille is and was, as a designer Robin Day was so much more. Born in High Wycombe, England, on May 25th 1915 Robin Day initially studied at High Wycombe School of Art before in 1934 a Royal Exhibition Scholarship took him to the London Royal College of Art where he studied furniture and interior design. Excluded from National Service on account of his asthma Robin Day spent the war years teaching at Beckenham School of Art before in 1946 he took up a position at Regent Street Polytechnic in London, in addition to undertaking numerous exhibition design commissions. Robin Day’s breakthrough as furniture designer came in 1948 when together with Clive Latimer, a former colleague from Beckenham, he won first prize in the Storage Units category of the New York Museum of Modern Art’s “International Low-Cost Furniture Competition” with a collection of delightful reduced wood and steel tubing cabinets.
Although as part of the prize the units were produced in small series by Roanoke, Virginia based Johnson-Carper Furniture and made available in selected US department stores, they never entered mass production: did however lead to a commission to design chairs for the 1951 “Festival of Britain” and an invitation from London based manufacturer Hille to help them update, refresh and modernise their programme. Featuring an extensive programme of cultural, scientific and technology exhibitions and events throughout the whole of the United Kingdom, the Festival of Britain was conceived to encourage a feeling of renewal and progression following the depression and deprivations of the war years. In addition to designing and furnishing the Homes and Garden Pavilion Robin Day was also asked to design chairs for the auditorium, orchestra pit and public areas of the new Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank; chairs which in the words of Stephen Bayley “presented rationed, beige Britain with a clean, colourful Scandiwegian option”2, chairs which with their innovative use of material and unfamiliar yet accessible forms raised Robin Day to one of the highest profile and highest regarded furniture designer in the UK and chairs which telling remain largely in use today.
At this point it is necessary, and indeed fair, to point out that Robin Day completed the commission for the Homes and Garden Pavilion in cooperation with his wife, the textile designer Lucienne Day. Herself a graduate of the Royal College of Art Lucienne Day’s reputation was, like that of her husbands, largely established at the Festival of Britain where the popular success of her “Calyx” textile created in conjunction with Heals’ of London and her wallpaper designs for Cole & Son and John Line saw her become one of the UK’s most important and influential textile designers. In the course of the 1960s and 70s Lucienne Day increasingly turned to pure art over applied arts; however, Lucienne and Robin Day continued to work closely on many projects including those with carpet manufacturer Woodward Grosvenor, an interior design contract with BOAC Airlines, and perhaps most notably the Day’s 25 year relationship with the department store chain John Lewis in context of which the Day’s worked across a range of corporate identity, interior design and product design commissions that helped define John Lewis as the premium UK department store chain.
Thus in many ways, at least superficially, Robin and Lucienne Day can be considered a British pendant to Charles and Ray Eames. In addition to his celebrated Festival of Britain work 1951 also marked the formal start of Robin Day’s cooperation with Hille. By popular legend, until the late 1940s Hille had largely produced generic furniture based on established forms before in 1949 company director Leslie Julius asked Robin Day to help them establish its own lines of contemporary furniture. The first Robin Day product for Hille was the 1951 Hillestak Chair, a wooden stacking chair whose endearingly reduced and spartan form language owns as much to limited availability of materials in post-War Britain and the need for industrial frugality as it does to any formal intentions on the part of the designer; and was a work which quickly established itself as a popular option for multi-purpose seating in canteens, schools, workplaces, et al, and as such further underpinned Day’s reputation.
Despite the success his work enjoyed, and his own popularity and fame, Robin Day remained firmly rooted in the everyday reality of the design profession, convinced in both the social responsibility of the designer and the need to employ new materials and new processes as economically as possible and for the benefit of all. Writing in 1953 Robin Day muses that “In Britain it is primarily in the low cost market that opportunities for the manufacture of progressive furniture occurs. The decorators’ market as it exists in America is almost unknown, and there are comparatively few buyers with a taste for modern design who can afford expensive furniture.” 3 A year later polypropylene was isolated and in 1957 made commercially available; recognising the opportunities offered Robin Day began experimenting with the new material before in 1963 Hille released Day’s injection moulded polypropylene Poly side chair, a work which despite its uncompromising orthogonal form, unnervingly short backrest, curiously askant frame and general lack of the flowing organic curves so en vogue in that period instantly established itself on the global market, thanks no doubt