Collectors and Curators
Focus on Chair Design

For Michael Rich, there's no such thing as a bad chair day.

Even if his chairs aren't in full working order, to the UCLA astronomer, they're still perfect. That's because they're the one-of-a-kind prototypes of icons of 20th-century design. "I love the look; they're beautiful," he says, of his George Nelson Marshmallow Sofa, and his Charles Eames dining chairs.

Forget Chippendale. For savvy collectors, the object du jour is a chair made by one of furniture's modern titans -- Eames, Frank Gehry, Gaetano Pesce. And not just any chair -- it must be one of the very last models the designer worked on before mass-manufacturing.

The reason? Collectors say it's like owning a signed copy of a manuscript before it went on to become a bestseller. Even more than a limited-edition photograph, they say, a one-of-a-kind prototype bears the mark of the person who created it.

"It's like getting the artist's original conception," says Peter Loughrey, who runs L.A. Modern, a Los Angeles auction house that specializes in 20th-century and contemporary furniture. "It's a way to get closer to the artist's feelings about what an object should look like. By the time a chair gets into production, it's different."

Indeed, the chair has come of age. Collectors view them as an emblem of 20th-century design, as a functional sculpture and as artifacts of evolving innovations. "It's the opportunity to have something unique," says Greg Kuharic, 20th-century decorative works of art specialist at Sotheby's in New York. Though the furniture being bought sometimes isn't functional, people still proudly display the artifact near a working, mass-produced model.

Museums are sitting up and taking notice, too. Chair design is the subject of two current exhibitions. The Denver Museum of Art's "20th-Century Design: Breaking All the Rules," depicts the chair's evolution in the 1900s, while in New York, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum has mounted "100 Masterpieces from the Vitra Museum," which highlights the concepts and materials central to design.

But sit down before you read the price of starting a collection. Dr. Rich paid $67,000 for his 1956 Marshmallow Sofa in 1998. Last year, he added the only known prototype of an Eames dining chair with arms, from 1945, for $107,000, and a 1941 chair created by Eames and Saarinen, for $88,000. Compare that to mass-produced Eames, which sold for about $30 in the '50s.

Even tiny renderings of prototypes have sky-high prices. Collectors are snapping up miniatures of famous chairs for as much as $700 at Switzerland's Vitra.

But when it comes to finding a full-size version, that requires some legwork. Some acquire prototypes by finding one of the test chairs used by early Eames-producer Herman Miller. Serious collectors work through specialists, usually local upscale furniture firms, such as Moss in New York.

Others go closer to the source. John Geresi, a banker in Houston, has a circa-1970 Molar chair that was created by studio furniture maker Wendell Castle, and later produced commercially. How did he get the glittery, fiberglass prototype that resembles a tooth? He bought it from people close to the artist himself.

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