A Midcentury Eastern European Odyssey in Five Chairs

Words Piotr WisniewskiDate 02 June 2023

What makes for good design? While we all recognize it when we see it, it’s harder to pinpoint the mechanics that make it so.

We looked to our newest addition in Bad Gastein, Austria, the cōmodo, to look under the hood, so to speak. Architect Piotr Wisniewski of weStudio, the brilliant multidisciplinary creative firm behind the hotel, shares with us his odyssey of finding key pieces of Eastern European design for the hotel through five chairs.

200-190 Chair 

I have an extensive midcentury furniture collection, especially from Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other places in the former Eastern Bloc, that I thought would be cool to bring to the cōmodo. The 200-190 chair is a famous model from the 1960s by the Polish designer Rajmund Halas. I had six chairs in my personal collection, but we needed 56 for the restaurant. First of all, they were still affordable even in bigger quantities. Secondly, we gave the Halas chairs a new life by covering them with full-grain leather and putting a protective coat of organic oil on the wood in a slightly darker color.

In the 1960s, people were smaller. Nowadays, when furniture producers are recommissioning design classics, they need to be resized because people are taller. Humanity is growing. I also measured the standard sitting height of a chair today, which is around 46 centimeters, and the Halas chairs were a little lower. We had to add a chip on the bottom of the legs to raise it by one-and-a-half centimeters and add another centimeter to the new upholstery so that the back is a little bit higher.

Back in the day, everybody had this chair. You’d see it in the Plattenbau houses in the Soviet Bloc because it fit in small spaces and was upholstered with cheap textiles. It was an affordable chair for social housing. We made a boutique version out of it, by turning a simple product into an upscale one. 

Bunny Easy Chair 

Józef Chierowski has two chairs that are Polish design classics: one is called 366 and the other Bunny chair. There is a company called 366 who bought the permissions from the designer’s family to produce them. You can now buy the new reedition, which might have been easier than upcycling the armchairs, but I didn’t want to compromise. We were sourcing the originals and renovating them, which cost us much more than a new piece but, at the end, each chair has a history.

Wega F-015 Swivel Chair 

The Wega chair was built a little bit later than the Danish Egg chair from Arne Jacobsen, which was revolutionary in its design. Jacobsen designed the original chair for the SAS Royal Hotel in Copenhagen so that guests could have privacy thanks to the extended ears. The comfortable chair swiveled, making it easy to turn when they wanted to talk with someone. Multiple designers all around the world were inspired by the Danish version, but each had a different interpretation of it and used different materials.

While refurbishing the Wega chairs, we upscaled them with better materials. Though, how many chairs broke during renovation? We are talking about chairs that are 60 years old and made of wood in Eastern Europe. The quality for that time was quite ok. But for a few of the pieces, we had to build a part of the armchair, one-to-one, and restore them carefully.

GFM-64 Armchair 

I think I had 2 of them in my collection and the rest I sourced from eBay, private collectors, and even basements of neighbors. It started with the mockup room 312 and at that time we didn’t have chairs that were ready with new upholstery. So, I brought mine from my childhood home and staged it in the cōmodo. It is still in the room 312. Then I started sourcing them and reupholstering them with leather or different textiles. At the end, we have a different one in every room. The chair is by Polish designer Edmund Homa who studied in Denmark, and that’s why he has a Scandinavia-inspired line.

In Poland, there were no luxury woods, such as teak or rose wood. Instead, the designers were using simple, affordable woods and painting them dark so that they looked luxurious. They had the lines, they had the skills, but the quality of the furniture was not the same as in Scandinavia. What we’re trying to do is to display the furniture and put all our efforts towards making them durable, like making sure the wood is glued properly and the new upholstery will last for at least 20-30 years.

Tatra Chair by František Jirák

I just liked the form of the Tatra armchair by the Czech designer Jirák. It’s bent wood design is unique for this period. The eyes of the Eastern European designers at that time were pointed in two directions: one was Scandinavia and the second was Italy.

Jirák was inspired by what was happening in Scandinavia and made his own interpretation of it. The chair is named after the Tatra mountains on the border of Poland and Czechoslovakia. So, it’s a combination of the local culture and local materials combined with foreign technique. For me, the Tatra chair is one of the most beautiful designs from the 1960s.  

We wanted to show different variations of the 1960s throughout the hotel. The guest has this seamless experience, while looking at different interpretations of the decade. Sometimes they see the original classics from Italy, sometimes from the Eastern Bloc, and sometimes custom made. But no Scandinavian pieces. Everything that is the most obvious for a standard guest who’s thinking midcentury, we don’t have it.

Wega chair image courtesy Vinterior
Tatra chair image courtesy Cherished Designs UK