Early projects
In 1850, Michael Thonet presented his chair no. 4 at an exhibition of the trade association of
Lower Austria. The gastronomer Anna Daum was fascinated with it and gave him a large-scale
order to furnish her coffee house at Vienna’s Kohlmarkt.
Later on, an order from a hotel in Budapest for 400 copies of chair no. 4 was added. These are
milestones in the early project business at Thonet.
In 1904, Otto Wagner, a teacher at the art academy and one of the “original fathers” of the
Vienna Secession, designed an armchair made of squared beech wood in an objectively strict
constructive style for the assembly hall of the directorate of the Vienna Postal Savings Bank:
fauteuil no. 6516, the so-called “Postal Savings Bank armchair”.
