The £50,000 chair: contemporary designers choose radical new shapes for their furniture-meets-art seating

A chair has an archetypal shape, right? Not if you follow the current direction taken by contemporary designers.

Radical new shapes are emerging as new technologies combine with traditional handcrafting to create visually striking seats that balance structural elegance with unprecedented freedom of form.

Take Alex Hull’s hand-forged bronze Line chair, priced £20,400, from Mayfair-based Gallery Fumi. The Nottingham Trent University graduate’s one-off design pushes concept and craft to its absolute limits.

Or check out the limited-edition Fibonacci chair with its dramatically curling back rest, from Dutch-Croatian-Indonesian designer Sebastian Brajkovic — price on request from Carpenters Workshop Gallery.

You can argue these designs are more like artworks than chairs for everyday use, yet both are fully functional.

The same can be said for the sculptural L’Infini chair created by Gildas Berthelot for Paris-based Galerie BSL. Its curvaceous arabesques wowed visitors to The Salon Art + Design in New York where it launched in November.

Hand-carved by Montreal-based Berthelot in bleached maple or walnut or ebonised maple, it is available in three sizes, each in an edition of three, priced about £48,000.

That’s a staggering price for a chair, I hear you say — but this is museum-quality work. Berthelot’s designs feature in Quebec’s Fine Art Museum, while Brajkovic’s work is held in New York’s Museum of Arts and Design and at the V&A.

Designs like these are akin to the yawning gap between haute couture and high street fashion. And where the avant-garde lead, others will surely follow.

Boundary-breaking seating by London-based, Australian designer Brodie Neill includes his Cowrie chair for Made in Ratio, priced £2,376. Inspired by the concave lines of seashells, it’s created from bent plywood using a single-surface fold with either a walnut or natural or ebonised ash veneer.

“The curvilinear shape results from an extensive research process that bridges the handmade with the digital to create a seemingly seamless all-in-one structure,” says Neill.

Designers are also creating crisply geometric forms using unusual material combinations. Check out Poltrona 103 from Milan-based DimoreStudio, price on request, which has a well-deserved reputation for richly layered interior design projects.

This neat armchair has a glossy, lacquered wood and aluminium structure while its seat and back are covered in fabric and pink mirror.

Equally eye-catching are architect Daniel Libeskind’s compact Elemental Split Unit armchairs launched at his solo show Fundamental Elements, at David Gill Gallery last autumn.

Available in blue patinated bronze with white Carrara marble or black patinated bronze and stainless steel, each chair comes in a limited edition of eight, priced £57,600 each.

Lunar and planetary orbits are the inspiration behind the curved trajectories of Lara Bohinc’s latest linear seating. The London-based jewellery and furniture designer plays with circles, squares and half-circles to create elegantly minimal designs such as Celeste (£2,859), Orbit (£2,757), Solar (£2,953) and Lunar (£2,868).

Frames are made from galvanised steel with Kvadrat wool fabrics for seats and backs. “I’m inspired by the perpetual circular movement of the planets,” says Bohinc. “A globe is the perfect geometric shape — graphic and feminine, modern yet ancient.”

The cosmos is also cited by London-based design duo, Patrik Fredrikson and Ian Stallard, as inspiration for their boundary-breaking Species seating, with a chaise at £57,600 and sofa at £66,000, each a one-off piece, from David Gill Gallery.

“Species is a study in evolution through the media of furniture design,” says Stallard. Sculptural yet functional, these baroque seats are created from polyurethane, rubber, fibreglass and polyester.

This unusual combination of materials gives them a raw energy that generates emotional appeal while being comfortable for lounging.

Just as unconventional is New York-based, Turkish designer Betil Dagdelen’s sinuous Peacock chair made from hose, foam, steel, cable, alpaca yarn and custom upholstery, priced about £11,400 from Cristina Grajales Gallery.

Formerly a set designer in fashion and film, Dagdelen works mainly with midcentury iron-rod chair frames into which she weaves seats, backs and arm rests to create a whole new take on how we sit.