Fivra Cane Medallion Bar Chair

Fivra's back is a round medallion whose frame turns as a single ring, filled with woven cane. Below the medallion the back divides into four uprights: the two outer ones are broad and open out to the sides like a lyre as they drop to the seat, while the two inner ones are slim and stand almost upright on a deliberately wavy, irregular, hand shaped line. Only the two outer stiles carry a turned double ring collar, set low like a bamboo node, and the three voids between them give the back its rhythm.

The seat is a saddle shaped from strips glued edge to edge; it draws a soft quadrilateral whose edges narrow inward, and its surface is hollowed with shallow passes of a scooping tool, which in the unfinished photograph read as a regular field of tool marks. The chair has no seat rail and no apron at all: the legs socket straight into the underside of the seat. In the bare photograph the seat is already in place, which is why the first image is not an incomplete frame but a finished chair in its unfinished state.

The legs are round in section, splay markedly in four directions and taper towards the floor. The footrest stretchers do close into a ring around all four faces, but the ring is not planar: the two side rods are joined about one rod thickness lower than the front and back ones. All four are the same part, slim turned rods of cigar shape that taper at the ends and swell gently at mid span. There is no medial member, no diagonal brace and no separate footrest bar; the plain front rod does the work of the footrest. The photographs show the unfinished natural version alongside the walnut stained one with a terracotta fabric upholstered seat.