Kilin Chair

With a vast inventory of beautiful furniture at 1stDibs, we’ve got just the kilin chair you’re looking for. Each kilin chair for sale was constructed with extraordinary care, often using animal skin, wood and leather. Your living room may not be complete without a kilin chair — find older editions for sale from the 20th Century and newer versions made as recently as the 21st Century. A kilin chair, designed in the Mid-Century Modern style, is generally a popular piece of furniture. A well-made kilin chair has long been a part of the offerings for many furniture designers and manufacturers, but those produced by Sergio Rodrigues and Oca are consistently popular.

Prices for a kilin chair can differ depending upon size, time period and other attributes — at 1stDibs, they begin at $2,404 and can go as high as $17,900, while the average can fetch as much as $6,800.

The prolific architect and designer Sergio Rodrigues is often called the "father of modern Brazilian design," but it is the second adjective in that phrase that deserves emphasis: Rodrigues’s great achievement was to create furniture in a style that captured the spirit, character and personality of his country.

Modernity came slowly to 20th-century Brazil, politically and culturally. The nation finally realized genuine constitutional democracy in 1945, ushering in a new, progressive era in the arts. More often than not, the luxurious furnishings of that time and place, with their gleaming wood, soft leathers and inviting shapes, share a sensuous, uniquely Brazilian quality that distinguishes them from the more rectilinear output of American mid-century modernists and Scandinavian makers of the same era. Until that time in Brazil, heavy furniture based on historical European models had been the norm.

In the late 1940s, designer Joaquim Tenreiro introduced sleek, minimalist chairs and cabinets; José Zanine Caldas, now best known for his later artisanal work, created plywood furnishings for mass production; the Italian architect Lina Bo Bardi, a former editor for the Gio Ponti-founded magazine Domus — and a furniture designer with talent, imagination and a social conscience — set up shop in São Paulo, designing elegant, flexible chairs set on slim metal frames.

This was the heady scene into which Rodrigues, the son of an artistically prominent Rio de Janeiro family, arrived after graduating in 1952 from the national university. He moved to Curitiba and helped establish the furniture manufacturer Móveis Artesanal with Italian designer Carlo Hauner and Austrian architect Martin Eisler — as well as Carlo’s brother Ernesto Hauner — which eventually rebranded as Forma. Later, Rodrigues relocated to Rio de Janeiro where he founded Oca in 1955, a company that would become the preeminent maker and retailer of modernist furniture in Brazil. 

When architects Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer were tasked in 1956 with the whirlwind project to plan, design and build the new capital, Brasília, in five years, they used Rodrigues’s early chairs, with their softly-contoured lines and caned seats and backrests, to furnish many of the buildings.

Rodrigues would realize the true expression of his talents in — and garner international awards and acclaim with — his Mole chair of 1957. The word mole means "soft" in Portuguese, but can be interpreted as "easygoing" or even "listless." The chair, which is also known as the Sheriff chair, features a sturdy, generously proportioned frame of the native South American hardwood jacaranda, upholstered with overstuffed leather pads that flap like saddlebags across the arms, seat, and backrest.

Rodrigues's Mole chair invites sprawling — perfect for the social milieu of the bossa nova and caipirinha cocktails; where a languorous afternoon spent chatting and joking is the apex of enjoyment. The seat won first prize at the IV Concorso Internazionale del Mobile in Cantù, Italy, in 1961, and ISA Bergamo acquired the rights to manufacture a modified version of Rodrigues’s original design.

In 1963, Rodrigues established a shop called Meia-Pataca, which sold simpler and more affordable furniture he had designed, such as his Tonico seating, which was intended for student housing.

Most of the estimated 1,200 armchairs, sofas, tables, storage cabinets and dining tables Rodrigues created in his long career are imbued, in one way or another, with the air of robust relaxation that defines the Mole chair. He was a designer who was true to the temperament of his people.

Find vintage Sergio Rodrigues furniture for sale on 1stDibs.

More often than not, vintage mid-century Brazilian furniture designs, with their gleaming wood, soft leathers and inviting shapes, share a sensuous, unique quality that distinguishes them from the more rectilinear output of American and Scandinavian makers of the same era.

Commencing in the 1940s and '50s, a group of architects and designers transformed the local cultural landscape in Brazil, merging the modernist vernacular popular in Europe and the United States with the South American country's traditional techniques and indigenous materials.

Key mid-century influencers on Brazilian furniture design include natives Oscar Niemeyer, Sergio Rodrigues and José Zanine Caldas as well as such European immigrants as Joaquim Tenreiro, Jean Gillon and Jorge Zalszupin. These creators frequently collaborated; for instance, Niemeyer, an internationally acclaimed architect, commissioned many of them to furnish his residential and institutional buildings.

The popularity of Brazilian modern furniture has made household names of these designers and other greats. Their particular brand of modernism is characterized by an émigré point of view (some were Lithuanian, German, Polish, Ukrainian, Portuguese, and Italian), a preference for highly figured indigenous Brazilian woods, a reverence for nature as an inspiration and an atelier or small-production mentality.

Hallmarks of Brazilian mid-century design include smooth, sculptural forms and the use of native woods like rosewood, jacaranda and pequi. The work of designers today exhibits many of the same qualities, though with a marked interest in exploring new materials (witness the Campana Brothers' stuffed-animal chairs) and an emphasis on looking inward rather than to other countries for inspiration.

Find a collection of vintage Brazilian furniture on 1stDibs that includes chairs, sofas, tables and more.

While this specific seating is known to all for its comfort and familiar form, the history of how your favorite antique or vintage lounge chair came to be is slightly more ambiguous.

Although there are rare armchairs dating back as far as the 17th century, some believe that the origins of the first official “lounge chair” are tied to Hungarian modernist designer-architect Marcel Breuer. Sure, Breuer wasn’t exactly reinventing the wheel when he introduced the Wassily lounge chair in 1925, but his seat was indeed revolutionary for its integration of bent tubular steel.

Officially, a lounge chair is simply defined as a “comfortable armchair,” which allows for the shape and material of the furnishings to be extremely diverse. Whether or not chaise longues make the cut for this category is a matter of frequent debate.

The Eames lounge chair, on the other hand, has come to define somewhat of a universal perception of what a lounge chair can be. Introduced in 1956, the Eames lounger (and its partner in cozy, the ottoman) quickly became staples in television shows, prestigious office buildings and sumptuous living rooms. Venerable American mid-century modern designers Charles and Ray Eames intended for it to be the peak of luxury, which they knew meant taking furniture to the next level of style and comfort. Their chair inspired many modern interpretations of the lounge — as well as numerous copies.

On 1stDibs, find a broad range of unique lounge chairs that includes everything from antique Victorian-era seating to vintage mid-century modern lounge chairs by craftspersons such as Hans Wegner to contemporary choices from today’s innovative designers.