MICHAEL VON JAKUBOWSKI (IDEA)

fortino

... it is not possible to date exactly when the first grotto furniture was created; it was already designed in the Renaissance for the artificial grottoes of castles and their gardens.

Thomas Chippendale designed a grotto chair that was published in 'Design for Garden Seats' in 1762.

Only the designs of the Venetians are documented, who often produced the unusual pieces of furniture as commissions for entire shell rooms from 1890 onwards. In the 1920s, the poet Edith Sitwell posed on a grotto chair for 'Vogue'. Helena Rubinstein equipped her salon with an unusual and rare tête-â-tête double seat and Otto Dix placed grotto chairs in some of his paintings.

Grotto furniture can be divided into two types: the presumably older line is wood-colored, the other has a poliment silver plating that has been lustred (colored). The formal language is clearly Mediterranean and, if you look more closely, can even be systematized in terms of production technology.

It requires great craftsmanship to build and hold such a piece of furniture. Our grotto chair has the classic shape of the 19th century and is available in two versions - the version with a whitish finish, in which the wood remains partially visible, and the one that, based on Venetian models, has poliment silver plating that has been lustred in color.