Design Moment: Wassily chair, 1925

It’s not, by even the most austere sitter’s standards, a comfortable-looking chair – not one you could see yourself curling up in with a good book – but the Wassily Chair is a modern classic. It was designed by Hungarian architect and designer Marcel Breuer (1902-1981) when he was just 22 and already a protege of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius. For this chair he took inspiration from his bicycle, bending tubes to create a simple chair frame, a timely vision as a German manufacturer had just perfected the technology to produce seamless steel tubing that could bend and still stay strong.

Breuer described the chair as his “most logical, the least cosy”. He called the prototype the “Model B3” – a particularly modernist way of naming pieces, later changing it to the Wassily, after his friend the well-known painter Wassily Kandinsky. The chair went into production in 1925, which when you consider that so many interiors then were still slowly emerging out of Victorian clutter and lavish decoration, was a bold move. Indeed, the first manufactures of the Wassily, Thonet, dropped it due to lack of interest from buyers. It became particularly popular in the 1980s – an era when chrome and leather furniture was in vogue – although nowadays it looks a bit self-consciously “architecty” in a domestic setting but suits commercial spaces perfectly. It is now manufactured under licence by Knoll.