April 2008 • In Production
Balancing Act
A new version of Jeff Miller’s Littlebig Chair reveals the trick of its structure.
By Belinda Lanks
When Enrico Baleri founded the furniture company Baleri Italia in 1984, he approached newfangled technologies and young designers with an open mind. But there was one thing he wouldn’t tolerate. “He despised wood,” says Jeff Miller, a New York designer who has worked for Baleri Italia for five years. “His father actually had a wood factory, and rather than join his father’s company, he started this new modern design company and eschewed wood from any product henceforth.”
That all changed in 2004, when new management at Baleri Italia lifted the ban. Two years later, it released Miller’s Littlebig Chair, a formal dining chair with a molded-plywood seat cantilevered off an aluminum frame. Miller has now designed a new, more casual version that does away with the curved frame behind the seat back. “That piece was nothing more than a magic trick,” Miller says. “It looked like it was performing some kind of function, when in fact all of the support was happening on the front edge.” Here he takes us through the other sleights of hand of the new Littlebig Chair, available through M2L (800-319-8222, www.m2lcollection.com).
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As with a piece of paper, if you bend plywood veneers in two directions at once, they rip or crumple. But a German company developed a technique using tiny strands of wood layered in two directions to make plywood that can be bent into 3-D shapes. That’s how we were able to get these side panels that fold over the edges and the seat back that goes the other way.
You can get the seat in light or dark wood (which is like a blackish charcoal stain); in lacquered white, red, or black; or covered in leather.
The frame comes in polished aluminum or painted white, red, or black. Inside the aluminum extrusion, there’s a transverse section that was developed specially to keep it strong enough to take the weight of this kind of cantilever.
There’s nothing underneath the chair supporting it other than that front bar. The plywood manufacturer and metal-frame factory were skeptical. But I insisted that the side panels would form a kind of shelf bracket, a transverse support to cantilever the whole chair off the front edge. It was a very satisfying day when I received a video from the factory of their largest man sitting on the chair and balancing from the front edge. So it worked!
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