Here is my newly updated butterfly chair aka B.K.F. Chair or the Hardoy Chair. I’m quite proud of this piece because it’s the first furniture piece that I renovated. I found the steel frame and the leather cover from 2 different sources. The frame is from craigslist, and the person that was selling gave it to me for a good price. It was extremely rusty at the time I purchased it but since it was the original, I couldn’t pass it up. With a stop at the hardware store and a couple hours of labor, I was able to renew it to it’s full glory thanks to this blog . The chair was originally owned by the seller’s roommate back in the 50′s or 60′s and it was kept in her garage for decades. This is a fine example of one man’s junk being another man’s treasure.
I ended up choosing a sienna/cognac color for the cover. I imagined leather would work well with my room and the rug so I’m pretty satisfied with my choice. Overall it looks better than I expected juxtaposed with the black bullet planter, but it’s just a place holder until I can find a small side table. It seems like my furniture hunting will never end.
Here ia a story and some great images with the chair.
” The chair was designed by Jorge Ferrari-Hardoy, Antonio Bonet and Juan Kurchan in Argentina in 1938. They introduced their new chair of leather and enameled steel at an interior design exhibition in Buenos Aires in 1940, where it was discovered by the Museum of Modern Art. At the request of MoMA design director Edgar Kaufmann Jr., Hardoy sent three pre-production chairs to New York. One is in the MoMA collection and one is at the Frank Lloyd Wright house Fallingwater, but no one knows where the third chair went. Naming the Butterfly as one of the “best efforts of modern chair design,” Kaufmann accurately predicted that it would become extremely popular. ”
“Knoll acquired US production rights of the Hardoy chair in 1947, bringing international notice and commercial success to the design. A rash of inferior copies prompted legal action by Knoll in 1950. After losing thier claim of copyright infringement, Knoll dropped the chair from its line in 1951. More than five million copies of the chair were estimated to have been produced by numerous manufacturers during the 1950′s alone. ”
