Four long years in the making, Vegetal designed by Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec and produced by Vitra is a chair with a very long tail… In fact, as the story goes, one that leads all the way back to the gardens of the 19th century, to a time when young plants were painstakingly trained to grow in the form of chairs…  But this just released work by the French duo is much more ode than parody.  With Vegetal it was important for the Bouroullecs and Vitra to create not just an evocative visual rendition of a chair inspired by plants but also to replicate their natural growth patterns within the very process of mass manufacture.  (Suddenly the four year time line starts to feel reasonable.)  

No doubt destined to be a Vitra centre piece in Milan in April, the intrinsic goodness of Vegetal, I think, makes it a very suitable new chair for such troubled times as ours…