He's a social lounger.

It's hard to move around Paris working where I do, without taking notice of chairs. Talking about café chairs in Paris almost seems like a cliché. But about 25% of cafés are filled with Marais chairs, another 40% are filled with chairs almost exactly like our Cricket chairs. I did see a café or two making use of the Jasper Morrison Air Chair, though the strangest use has to be a McDonalds fully outfitted with white Eames Molded Plastic Side Chairs. (click here for image)

The chair that really caught my attention however was the lounge sibling to our recently launched Cricket Chair - not used in a café but, rather, scattered about in the Jardin de Tuileres, the large park stretching out from the the end of the Louvre. For the most part they were concentrated around the fountains with tourists and locals alike sitting in them, taking each other’s pictures, talking and moving the chairs here and there. As I looked around I noticed that many of the chairs were arranged often facing each other and sometimes in small groups - there was something about this chair being in the right place and having just the right lounging posture that seemed to facilitate conversation.

I sat for a while watching people move about and listening to my iPod (the international sign of "I'd rather not take a picture of you and your family by the fountain"), and wondered, maybe I'm looking too deeply into these simple chairs and have read one too many of Rob Forbes's Design Notes. However, upon leaving I saw the image posted below: a bench that looks as though it could hold a majority of the party in question by itself, but instead they chose to circle the bench with ten chairs, using the bench as a sort of a conference table. Whether a serious or casual conversation had taken place, I can't be certain. But whatever it was, I'd bet that it didn't last less than an hour.

Comments

[Mike]

The chairs you admire are made by Fermob. (Fermobusa.com) It is a French company that has been making bistro furniture since the 19th century. They also make the folding chairs used in Bryant Park in NYC.