Slip Chair | simple, adaptable, reusable

Simple, adaptable and easily taken apart: a chair designed for a long life of changing use, and a model for sustainable design.

Slip Chair

Slip Chair prototype
London SE17

Design | Development | Fabrication

Based on a 1960s model found on a Camden Town side street, the updated version began with brown paper patterns and found its way via various prototypes into an exhibition at 3 Mills.

It’s a simple idea: 2 legs, 2 arms and 3 dowels fixed mechanically for straightforward disassembly, made in birch ply or waxed teak with tailored seats to slip on in cotton, linen & wool. Easily changed, think of the slip as a frock or an overcoat to swap with the seasons. The chair is light, portable, fits in anywhere including outdoors, and is endlessly adaptable with material, print and colour combined to suit and made to order.

This little chair is a model for sustainable design: uses few and simple materials with inbuilt flexibility to keep it in use for as long as possible and at end of life each element can be reused or recycled. These principles are relatively easy to apply to modest, small-batch production and more complicated for a large scale interior project; nevertheless it’s useful to have clear ambition and an example to guide and explain design direction:

Keep existing over building new, use time and material resourcefully, and design everything to work, look good, wear-well and adapt: the opposite of fashionable & disposable.

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