Sesc Stool

The Italian-born Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi came to imbue the pure and lofty if somewhat bloodless tenets of modern design with the warm and earthy character of her adopted homeland.

Bardi was born in Rome and graduated in 1939 from the Università degli studi di Roma “La Sapienza” with a degree in architecture. She moved to Milan, worked with Gio Ponti, among other modernist luminaries, and began a career in design journalism. Bardi served as an editor for Ponti’s groundbreaking magazine, Domus, and in 1945 traveled for the publication throughout Italy with a photographer, documenting the physical destruction wrought by World War II.

Bardi moved to Brazil in 1947 with her husband, art dealer and critic Pietro Maria Bardi. There Pietro helped establish the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP) while his wife resumed her work in journalism and soon launched her architectural practice. Her first building project was designing a house for herself and her husband on a hillside in what were then the outskirts of São Paulo.

Built in 1951 and known as Casa de Vidro (or Glass House), it is a glass-walled box set on slim steel columns, inspired equally by the Bauhaus and Le Corbusier. Its interiors, with their mid-century furnishings, folk-art pieces and ethnographic curios, are reminiscent of those of Charles and Ray Eames’ house in California. (Bardi also created the interiors of the original MASP and was a natural choice to design the second museum when the institution had outgrown its first home.)

As a furniture designer, Bardi demonstrated flair from the start. The Bowl chair, designed in 1951 but not manufactured until Italian furniture maker Arper recently issued it, is a marvel of versatility. The seat can be swiveled to satisfy any attitude of repose or dismounted to serve as a rocking baby crib. That same year, she made the throne-like Bola de Latão chair, which in place of arms has stanchions topped by brass balls. Its slung leather seat and backrest have unfinished edges secured with lacing, giving the piece an artisanal, perhaps even sexual, air.

In the late 1950s and early ’60s, Bardi designed cushioned chairs with wooden frames whose softened angularity recalls the work of Pierre Jeanneret and Marcel Breuer’s 1938 furniture designs for Bryn Mawr College. But Bardi’s furniture construction and aesthetic sensibilities evolved in tandem with her populist principles. Her embrace of Brazil’s social mosaic was most fully expressed in her last major project, and her masterpiece: a combined cultural and recreational center in São Paulo known as the SESC Pompéia.

Built in stages between 1977 and ’82, the complex has as its core a renovated drum factory. In it, Bardi — to use architectural parlance — created a nonhierarchical environment, with equal prominence and care given to areas as disparate as theaters, sports facilities and places for old folks to sit and gossip or play chess.

Bardi’s last chairs, designed for the center, are built of solid wood, sturdy and durable with simple and graceful forms. They seem to suggest that the most interesting thing about a piece of furniture should be the person using it.

Find vintage Lina Bo Bardi furniture 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.

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.