Michael Thonet

Background

Michael Thonet (2 July 1796 – 3 March 1871) was a German-Austrian cabinetmaker born in Boppard on the Rhine, the son of a master tanner. After a carpenter's apprenticeship he set up his own workshop in Boppard in 1819. In the 1830s he experimented with furniture made of glued and bent wooden slats, producing the Boppard layerwood chair in 1836. Prince Metternich brought him to Vienna in 1842, where he worked with his sons on the interiors of Palais Liechtenstein and in 1849 founded his own company, transferred to his sons as Gebrüder Thonet in 1853.

Signature Style

Thonet's breakthrough was bending light, strong solid wood into curved shapes with hot steam. The result was light, elegant, durable bentwood furniture that broke with the heavy carved pieces of the past. His designs were reduced to a few standardised parts that could be made by division of labour, shipped flat and assembled on site.

Notable Works

• Chair No. 14 / 214 (1859), the Vienna coffee house chair, some 50 million produced by 1930
• Chair No. 4, used to furnish Vienna's Café Daum from 1850
• Chair No. 1 (1850) and the rocking chair No. 1 (around 1860)
• Bronze medal at the Great Exhibition, London 1851; silver at Paris 1855

Legacy

Thonet is credited with laying the cornerstone of industrial furniture production. By his death in Vienna in 1871 his sons' firm had sales outlets across Europe and in Chicago and New York. Thonet GmbH in Frankenberg, Germany, run with his fifth- and sixth-generation descendants as shareholders, still produces his bentwood chairs, and the 214 won the German Sustainability Award Design 2021 and the German Ecodesign Award 2024.