Gerrit Rietveld Metz Armchair

The Metz Armchair was named after the Amsterdam based department store Metz & Co. for which Rietveld designed the chair in 1942. As early as in 1932, Metz & Co. asked Rietveld to design a showroom for his furniture on top of their building in Amsterdam. It was in this showroom where Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe and later Pol Kjaerholm presented their contemporary designs in the Netherlands for the first time. During the Second World War Rietveld refused to adhere to the German ‘Kulturkammer’, a Nazi-controlled cultural board. As a result of this, he wasn’t allowed to produce the Armchair for Metz & Co. Luckily the drawings and prototypes were preserved and could be used to reconstruct the chair 75 years after its first design. The beautifully crafted frame of the chair was designed with thin slats of oak. The seat consists of an upholstered polyurethane foamed frame with an upholstered comfortable pad. This pad is finished with a blanket stitch that gives this historic d