Fat Chaise

Jover + Valls is an exciting modern Spanish furniture brand that seeks to combine traditional production techniques with innovative technologies for furnishings and decor that offer the best of both worlds. The company is primarily known for stylish seating such as stools, chaise lounges and armchairs. Jover + Valls also produces decorative home accessories like candleholders and throw blankets. 

Jover + Valls is the passion project of Javier Jover and Quico Valls. After earning his BFA at Universitat Politècnica de València, Jover gained experience working with leather by creating fashion accessories for Zara, a multi-national retail clothing brand. Valls, meanwhile, was learning about the intricacies of metalwork, including how to form aesthetic shapes while retaining the strength of the material. 

After two decades of working in their respective industries, Jover and Valls joined forces to build a brand that offers handmade luxury furniture and decor for any space. 

The atelier’s minimalist Wanderlust series draws on Bauhaus-level precision and features subtle details that you might miss at first glance, like in the modest-sized hand-turned nuts and bolts that affix the collection’s tanned cowhide leather seats and surfaces to the stool frames of the group’s armchairs, bar stools and ottomans. It was inspired in part by legendary German-American architect and designer Mies van der Rohe and his wisdom that "less is more."

With ergonomics in mind, Jover + Valls's Hug collection focuses more on the organic shapes and curves found in nature. Each light and airy chaise lounge or bar stool, which resemble the work of iconic modernist designer Charlotte Perriand, is inviting and envelops you in soft leather when you sit down. 

On 1stDibs, find Jover + Valls seating, decorative objects, textiles and more.

The late 19th and early 20th centuries saw sweeping social change and major scientific advances — both of which contributed to a new aesthetic: modernism. Rejecting the rigidity of Victorian artistic conventions, modernists sought a new means of expression. References to the natural world and ornate classical embellishments gave way to the sleek simplicity of the Machine Age. Architect Philip Johnson characterized the hallmarks of modernism as “machine-like simplicity, smoothness or surface [and] avoidance of ornament.”

Early practitioners of modernist design include the De Stijl (“The Style”) group, founded in the Netherlands in 1917, and the Bauhaus School, founded two years later in Germany.

Followers of both groups produced sleek, spare designs — many of which became icons of daily life in the 20th century. The modernists rejected both natural and historical references and relied primarily on industrial materials such as metal, glass, plywood, and, later, plastics. While Bauhaus principals Marcel Breuer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe created furniture from mass-produced, chrome-plated steel, American visionaries like Charles and Ray Eames worked in materials as novel as molded plywood and fiberglass. Today, Breuer’s Wassily chair, Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona chair — crafted with his romantic partner, designer Lilly Reich — and the Eames lounge chair are emblems of progressive design and vintage originals are prized cornerstones of collections.

It’s difficult to overstate the influence that modernism continues to wield over designers and architects — and equally difficult to overstate how revolutionary it was when it first appeared a century ago. But because modernist furniture designs are so simple, they can blend in seamlessly with just about any type of décor. Don’t overlook them.

Sit back, relax and get all of the ergonomic support you could ever need by introducing an alluring antique or vintage chaise longue in your living room or by your outdoor fire pit.

The chaise longue is an upholstered piece of furniture that was made popular in France in the early 16th century. This low reclining seat — a “long chair” in English — boasts an elongated form and low back that extends about half the length of the furnishing, affording the welcome opportunity for a sitter to put their feet up and relax. A comfortable common ground between sofas and daybeds, early iterations of chaise longues were discovered in Ancient Egypt and were later frequently used in both Greece and Rome.

In the late 1700s, the first chaise longues were imported to America, and English speakers have struggled with the name ever since. (In the United States, the term is frequently spelled “chaise lounge.”) So, how do you pronounce chaise longue? It sounds like “shayz lawng,” but limiting it to shayz is perfectly acceptable in the States.

Antique Victorian chaise longues and 19th-century chaise longues bring luxury and perhaps extravagance to your living space while mid-century modern chaise longues, designed by the likes of Adrian Pearsall, Vladimir Kagan or Milo Baughman, can alter an interior with dazzling geometric contours and richly varied textures.

On 1stDibs, find many kinds of chaise longues for your home — from sculptural works by Charlotte Perriand to plush and velvety Louis XVI pieces to minimalist contemporary versions to suit your understated decor.