Children Chair, Rey Junior

The most successful piece of Swiss seating furniture of all time is based on an invention patented in 1972. When Bruno Rey (b. 1935), who studied under Willy Guhl at the Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich (today ZHdK), began collaborating in the late 1960s with the chair and table manufacturer Dietiker in Stein am Rhein, he had already been working for some time on an alternative to the conventional wooden frame chair. In his design, the chair legs are joined to the self-supporting seat by means of a bonded aluminum console that was handmade using sand casting in 1970/71 and afterward produced using the gravity die casting process. The invention of aluminum pressure die casting in 1989 then allowed for the rational production of the chair in large series. Except for the final finishing, the entire production process could now be done by machine, including gluing at a bonding carousel. Just like Model 3300, made of local beech, which has sold more than one million units worldwide, Bruno Rey’s children’s chair with matching table is extraordinarily stable and stackable.