What do you visualise when someone mentions a hospital chair? Something clunky and hard to manoeuvre, maybe; a strange hybrid fireside-type chair typically involving wipe-clean sickly pastel-coloured vinyl. It’s something to think about with two new hospitals – the national maternity and the children’s hospital on the horizon – and the vast amounts of money that will be spent on their furnishings.

What you don't immediately visualise is possibly the most elegant hospital chair ever designed: the Paimio chair. Designed by Finnish architect Alvar Aalto, it is named after the Paimio tuberculosis sanatorium in southwest Finland, which he also designed, and everything about it proclaims modernist principles.

At the time, the main therapy for tuberculosis was sunlight and the hospital wings are angled to maximise exposure to the sun. As patients followed the sun through the day – going out on to the terrace or sitting in large windowed areas – they needed a chair that was light enough to be moved around easily. It was important that the materials could be cleaned easily and comfort was a factor – this common-room chair looks as relaxing and comfortable as any overstuffed lounge chair. In keeping with the key modernist idea of truth to materials with nothing hidden – the construction of the Paimio chair is easy to see. Aalto used his signature bentwood material – originally beech stripped and moulded into the cantilevered shape. The seat with its curved headrest was birch-ply – material that soon replaced the original beech for the frame so that the materials for the chair could be 100 per cent manufactured in Finland.