Revenge of the plastic stacking chair
Unless you’re nursing a new-born, are on the long-term sick, or recovering from major surgery, it’s unlikely you’ll have watched as much You’ve Been Framed as me. I’m completely addicted to it, and can’t attend a wedding or see a trampoline without expecting something to go awfully wrong at any minute. Harry Hill, who does the voice over, has a long-running joke about plastic stacking chairs being sentient and out for revenge. It’s because they feature (breaking, tipping over, or both) in so many clips, you see.
I started thinking more about these barely-visible bits of furniture on holiday in Corfu this year. I came up with the theory that you could distinguish holiday lets from locals’ homes by the fact that the holiday homes had fancy patio furniture, while local homes all had a plastic stacking chair – actually called a Monobloc – on the balcony.
I then read this article about the origins of the Monobloc, and how they came to be surely one of the most ubiquitous but unnoticed design items in the world. I took the above shot in France, where the decorative insert in the back appealed to me.
The article points out that some recent designers have tipped their berets to this classic piece of affordable, democratic design, including the Campana Brothers (below), a design duo from Brazil, where inventively repaired and hacked Monoblocs are part of the streetscape. And you can see lots of other examples of the Monobloc being repurposed by the design world in this piece. As soon as you start thinking about it, you’ll see these babies everywhere.
In our holiday home we had a set of six dark green ones which we were happy to sit on for over twelve years. One got a broken leg which was repaired with a wooden splint and another had a hole cut in the seat to make a bedroom comode for my Mum. Such useful and adaptable things.
whenever I think of these chairs I think of Del Boy as he used to have them as his dining room furniture and makes me laugh when I see them. they are also recruited in around Christmas time when everyone is short of furniture so you spend ages ‘setting the scene’ with your trendy Christmas bits and then your mum/dad drags in the garden chair!
p.s. A BIG THANK YOU by the way as just been notified I won the beautiful cushions.
Brilliant news and they look gorgeous so can’t wait to get my hands on those
xxx