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Mandarin Chair
Mandarin Chair
IN THE WORKSHOP
IN THE WORKSHOP
The Mandarin Chair, designed by Neri&Hu, was origi-
nally conceived in connection with their design of the
Canton Table in Shanghai, a high end restaurant and so-
cial club that caters to an international clientele. The club
itself, a dark and moody ambiance that encourages long
meals and late night drinks, often among professional col-
leagues and business people, required a chair that could be
at once comfortable and elegant, a reflection of its unique
surroundings. With its angular, wooden frame and slight-
ly higher arm rests, the chair has an almost regal, throne
like quality, and there is a strong sense of movement, as if
about to take off in flight, while the soft, leather seating
grounds the frame back to the earth. The gently curving
seat is more organic in form, cradling the user and offer-
ing a sense of comfort that invites them to sit down for
awhile and relax, important in a chair meant for eating or
relaxing. Subtle textures such as the fine grain of wood
and creamy leather reflect the precision and attention to
detail applied to the design of this chair.
The Mandarin Chair was initially a challenge for the
Stellar Works production team – in a good way. “We
researched and developed new ways to adapt and inno-
vate certain technologies in order to correctly create the
chair’s particular bent wood framing, while still employ-
ing the hand crafted touch that gives it its singular style,”
states Ben Kirkby, Stellar Works Product Development
Manager.
“We [had] been looking a lot at typologies of chairs, par-
ticularly mid-century designers such as Hans Wegner
or Charles & Ray Eames,” said Neri&Hu, “and in the
Mandarin collection, those references were translated into
a table and a chair following the Asian typologies of the
temples: the round vs the rectangle. Those two shapes are
reflecting an entire ideology and the relevance of eating
together which is essential for Asian people. The round
shape at the East is symbolized by the temple of Heaven (a
round Pagoda in Beijing) while the square shape is repre-
sented by the temple of Earth.”
The Mandarin Chair is at once comfortable, elegant,
unique, and – in line with Stellar Works philosophy –
timeless. It is also a perfect example of the challenges
and opportunities faced by both designers and fabricators
working in the 21st century, and how, in the best of col-
laborations, both can be pushed towards innovative ideas
and solutions. For many designers it is a dream to have
the resources of advanced technologies, including tailor
made parts, alongside talented artisans – to allow them to
realise complicated designs while retaining the personal-
ised, handcrafted touch. This is the framework that Stellar
Works offers its designers and within which they are able
to design new and better pieces of furniture to meet the
needs of ever more creative spaces and clientele.
© Su Li
