Indian chair design, long overshadowed by architecture and textiles, emerges as a vital narrative of modernity and craft. From the iconic, collaboratively created Chandigarh chair to Nakashima’s grass-seated piece, Godrej’s Bauhaus-inspired steel chair, and experimental works like the Baobab and Zen Throne, these seats fuse local materials, global ideas and sustainability, reshaping furniture history at home and abroad.
For the longest time in India, the story of furniture design has been narrated through the lens of architecture, craft, or textiles. However, some of the country's most enduring design achievements have come in the simple form of a chair. Given it is our art and design month, this is the perfect time to bring you the history of some of India's most iconic chairs.
Even as people have appreciated the chairs coming out of India, they have often limited themselves to the iconic Chandigarh chair. Chairs from India reveal how Indian designers have channelled local materials, traditional craftsmanship, and contemporary living without treating furniture as mere utility or decoration. From the modernist legacy of Chandigarh to today's ultra-experimental studios, these chairs have shaped both the conversations and the seats the conversationalists are doing across home and abroad.
No other chair designed in India has ever achieved a greater international recognition and status than the Chandigarh Chair. Created in the 1950s for what is seen as India's first planned city, Chandigarh, it emerged out of the furniture programme set to go with the city alongside its civic buildings. While the chair has been associated with Swiss architect Pierre Jeanneret for the longest time, recent scholarship suggests the collaborative nature of the Chandigarh design office, where Indian architects and designers, including Eulie Chowdhury, Jeet Malhotra, A.R. Prabhawalkar, and others, came together with local craftsmen to find the furniture that would seamlessly enhance the public institutions.
The chair itself is singularly distinctive with its inverted V-shaped legs and a construction that involves teak with woven cane seats and back, designed as much for durability as for aesthetics. Once developed, it furnished offices, libraries, and government buildings across Chandigarh before many originals were auctioned off as surplus decades later. Their rediscovery transformed them into coveted collectables, with museums such as the Victoria and Albert Museum examining both their design significance and the complex history surrounding their authorship and export.
In 1964, the Japanese-American designer George Nakashima was working at Ahmedabad's National Institute of Design when he came up with a version of the grass-seated chair, its rectangular seat woven from twine made of natural grass and its joints left visible by design. Nakashima combined traditional Japanese woodworking with an interest in mass production, and the chair remains a reference point for how modernism was interpreted, rather than imported wholesale, in postcolonial India.
The tubular steel chair has its origins with the Bauhaus designers Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who developed the form between 1925 and 1927, reportedly taking their cue from the tubular steel frame of a bicycle. Thonet put the idea into production in 1930–31 with Breuer's Model B32, the first cantilevered version of the chair, and it was this cantilever that went on to define the look of tubular steel seating for decades afterwards.
In India, it was Godrej & Boyce that brought the style into local manufacture, producing tubular steel chairs, tables, and living-room sets through the 1930s as the Bauhaus aesthetic filtered into the country during the school's own active years, 1919 to 1933. The Godrej version ran a single length of tubular steel pipe from the armrest down to the base and relied on the same cantilever spring for its comfort, but paired the steel with hardwood rather than leaving it bare. It stands as one of the earliest instances of Bauhaus design being manufactured in India rather than simply imported or admired from afar, and it places Godrej alongside Ardeshir Godrej and Sir Dorabji Tata among the figures credited with laying the groundwork for the country's modern design industry.
Beyond Dreams' Baobab Chair is sewn from sustainably sourced teak and upholstered in handwoven organic cotton, its stately high back punctuated by bold, abstract cutouts that give a solid piece of furniture an unexpected sense of lightness. The geometric, tribal-inspired motifs and open-grain polish mean it sits comfortably in either a traditional or a contemporary room, and each chair is handcrafted rather than turned out to a fixed template, so no two pieces are quite identical. The upholstery is done by hand too, which, alongside the joinery, keeps the piece within the same artisanal tradition as the wood itself rather than treating the two as separate jobs.
Among contemporary works, Siddhant Jai Bothra's Zen Throne for Home of Chirmi is carved from ash wood and finished in lead-free paint, its form taking its cue from the unhurried rhythm of nature rather than any single reference point. The chairs are conceived and sold as a pair, and the pairing is where the design does most of its talking: one chair's paintwork dissolves into mist as it climbs towards its highest point, while the other blurs and softens at its base, so that the two read as counterweights to each other rather than duplicates. Reiki symbols are etched into the armrests, a detail meant to carry a sense of calm through to whoever sits on them. Bothra has also built the piece around advanced cutting techniques that keep wood waste down, a consideration that is becoming harder for Indian interiors to treat as optional.