Last Minute Stool

Spanish-born, Milan-based architect Patricia Urquiola doesn’t lack for commissions these days, and, unlike the work of many other high-concept architects, her projects tend to get constructed, envelope-pushing though they sometimes are. And when she’s not imagining covetable creations for contemporary furniture houses — including B&B Italia, Driade and Cassina, where she was named art director in 2015 — Urquiola makes headlines by designing some of the world’s most aesthetically ambitious hotels, such as 2016’s Il Sereno on Lake Como in Lombardy, Italy.

Born in Oviedo, in northern Spain, Urquiola grew up in a family that valued creativity. Everyone in the house, she says, talked and cared about design. She fondly remembers her mother going to London in the 1960s and ’70s and coming back home with a Mary Quant this, a David Hicks that. When it came time to go to university, Urquiola decided that her place was architecture school, first at the Polytechnic University of Madrid and then at the Polytechnic University of Milan, where she completed her design thesis — a felt carpet with a panel that connected to a home’s electricity source and telephone line so that you could plug, say, a table lamp and your phone into it — under the direction of legendary Italian industrial designer Achille Castiglioni.

Today, Urquiola has become a go-to when it comes to avant-garde product, hospitality and retail design, working with such blue-chip international furniture, fashion and hotel companies as Alessi, Baccarat, Salvatore Ferragamo, Kvadrat, Mandarin Oriental, Panerai, Rosenthal, W Hotels and Louis Vuitton, among many others. Her residential projects, meanwhile, though few and far between, stretch from such far-flung locations as Punta del Este, Uruguay, and Melbourne, Australia, to closer-to-home Udine, in northeastern Italy, where she designed the two-story, largely open-plan glass-and-cedar home of Patrizia Moroso, creative director of the family-owned design company that bears her last name.

Over the course of a long-term and highly productive collaboration spanning some 20 years, Urquiola has created dozens and dozens of Moroso-branded products. A chair from her 2001 Fjord line of seating, tables and poufs for the company sits in the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and Moroso debuted (love me) Tender, her modular sofa system upholstered in jersey, during Milan’s Salone Internazionale del Mobile in April of 2014.

Find Patricia Urquiola furniture on 1stDibs.

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.

Stools are versatile and a necessary addition to any living room, kitchen area or elsewhere in your home. A sofa or reliable lounge chair might nab all the credit, comfort-wise, but don’t discount the roles that good antique, new and vintage stools can play.

“Stools are jewels and statements in a space, and they can also be investment pieces,” says New York City designer Amy Lau, who adds that these seats provide an excellent choice for setting an interior’s general tone. 

Stools, which are among the oldest forms of wooden furnishings, may also serve as decorative pieces, even if we’re talking about a stool that is far less sculptural than the gracefully curving molded plywood shells that make up Sōri Yanagi’s provocative Butterfly stool. 

Fawn Galli, a New York interior designer, uses her stools in the same way you would use a throw pillow. “I normally buy several styles and move them around the home where needed,” she says.

Stools are smaller pieces of seating as compared to armchairs or dining chairs and can add depth as well as functionality to a space that you’ve set aside for entertaining. For a splash of color, consider the Stool 60, a pioneering work of bentwood by Finnish architect and furniture maker Alvar Aalto. It’s manufactured by Artek and comes in a variety of colored seats and finishes.

Barstools that date back to the 1970s are now more ubiquitous in kitchens. Vintage barstools have seen renewed interest, be they a meld of chrome and leather or transparent plastic, such as the Lucite and stainless-steel counter stool variety from Indiana-born furniture designer Charles Hollis Jones, who is renowned for his acrylic works. A cluster of barstools — perhaps a set of four brushed-aluminum counter stools by Emeco or Tubby Tube stools by Faye Toogood — can encourage merriment in the kitchen. If you’ve got the room for family and friends to congregate and enjoy cocktails where the cooking is done, consider matching your stools with a tall table.

Whether you need counter stools, drafting stools or another kind, explore an extensive range of antique, new and vintage stools on 1stDibs.