Side chair

Inventiveness and an entrepreneurial spirt define the mentality of late nineteenth-century furniture manufacturers. The original design for this chair was by the famed Gothic Revival architect E.W. Pugin for the Granville Hotel in 1870. Capitalizing on the notoriety of the Pugin name and the taste for the revival of medieval forms and decorations, a number of contemporaneous church furniture manufactures reproduced Pugin’s chair for their clients. They uniquely made slight adjustments to the design to adapt it for mass production and avoid patent infringement. Arguably, their interpretation of the chair is a more precise and refined design. While the proportions of the more traditionally crafted Granville model are bulky and rustic, this mass produced design has an elegance and grace to its lines, demonstrating the brilliant sophistication in design and industrial production capacity that some manufactures had attained. Indeed embodying an enterprising spirit, this chair demonstrates these manufactures’ creativity to turn a profit and deliver high quality on popular consumer demand.