The Catbird Seat

Folding Chair, “Nordic Rhythm”
Designer: Nathan Goldsworthy
Year: 2003
Description: jointed wood slats
Estimated cost: ??

Why I picked this chair: I found a few really cool folding chair images through a Google search, and when I followed the path back to their origin, I landed at designboom.com, an international design website. I not only found the chairs from my search (neat, cardboard folding chairs!), but also this beauty. It made designboom’s shortlist for its “100% folding chair” competition in 2003.

It is just plain amazing. It is a folding chair that unfolds to become a wood-slat floor, that can be used indoors or outdoors.
Pretty cool, huh?

Here it is folding/unfolding from “mat” to chair…

And here’s what the designer wrote about it…

Until it is folded, the chair is the floor. It is a decking surface - intended for inside or outside - which transforms into a long seat or day-bed. The seating form is achieved by folding the “mat” along the curved joints, creating three dimensional curves with the two dimensional surfaces.

I think it rocks. It’s currently only a prototype, as far as I can tell.

According to the design specs, it measures 2400mm by 1600mm in its flat state. That’s 2.6 feet by 1.7 feet for those of you who are American and don’t know the metric system. Kind of small, I think, but that is just the prototype.

If you want to see some other really well-designed (and innovative) folding chairs from the competition, click here.