Recto Verso by Martino Gamper at Ace Hotel (#LDF14)

A funny thing happened during London Design Festival 2014… a little collection of installations occurred at the Ace Hotel, curated by Laura Houseley of Modern Design Review… and it was… a marvel to behold.

This inspired collection of installations took over areas of the Ace Hotel, from the entrance, to the restaurant and even the soft seating area in the workspace room.

The café was home to my favourite piece – Martino Gamper’s Recto Verso chair – a simplified, modernised version of the traditional bentwood café chair which Gamper plans to produce himself. This quirky installation, with cute dog included, was also the international launch of this new functional chair.

“It is a bit about my fascination with the bentwood chair and a bit about my frustration with the furniture industry that I wanted to manufacture a chair myself. The chair is strong, easy to use; it stacks.”

Martino Gamper

At £299, it is more than twice the price of the Thonet chair that Gamper is basing this chair upon, although Thonet have the advantage of having sold more than 50 million chairs worldwide… and that was just before 1930!

Instead, this chair is in the region of some of the most popular chairs today, Ercol’s stacking chair or Case Furniture’s 675 chair by Robin Day.

This chair has a simplicity to make it timeless and a design to make it popular with a price to make it sell. Good luck Gamper, I hope to see hundreds of these chairs in every dining room or café.

Designer: Martino Gamper
Manufacturer: Martino Gamper
Year: 2014
Price: £299.00

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