Take Five: My favourite barstools

That is a mistake, because the island has moved to the middle of the room. The kitchen is now where a family eats breakfast, does homework, pours a drink and keeps the cook company, and the stools are where all of that happens. They are seen from every side, including from behind, which is the side most chairs are allowed to hide. And they are sat on for two minutes or for two hours, by a child kicking their heels or a guest in good shoes.

Environmental psychologist Lily Bernheimer argues that human evolution proves that we need refuge as well as prospect. We need somewhere to feel safe and secure, and we need a view before us – as much for its beauty as for its warning that something might be coming to eat us. Open-plan living is prospect at its purest.

A stool at an island is prospect in its plainest form: a perch with a view of the whole room. The good ones add a little refuge back – a seat that holds you, a footrest at the right height, something to lean on. These five do.

A declaration before we begin: we work with all five makers, and all five stools are on display in our London showrooms now. Read what follows knowing it. As with the Danish brands and the solid-wood makers, the order runs the other way round from the one you might suspect: we went looking for these pieces because of how they sit, and we stock them for the same reason.

Tractor Stool – BassamFellows

The one that started at the side of a road. The story goes that Craig Bassam, an architect working on a project in Switzerland, came across an old tractor seat and was struck by how well it held him upright without any need for a back. He set out to make the same thing in wood. The stool he drew became, in effect, BassamFellows’ calling card when the studio he founded with Scott Fellows showed it at the Salone del Mobile in Milan in 2003.

It is still the purest idea on this list. There is no back and no upholstery, just a dished seat carved from a single block of solid timber – walnut, oak or ash – shaped by a precision carver and then finished by hand by cabinetmakers in Italy. It comes in three heights, the tallest with a seat at 77 centimetres. The studio calls its approach Craftsman Modern, and the Tractor is the clearest proof of it: a workman’s seat made with a cabinetmaker’s care. It also does something few stools manage, which is to look as good tucked under a counter as it does pulled out.

Circle Bar Stool – Overgaard & Dyrman

The one with the Danish line. Jasper Overgaard and Christian Dyrman met at Aalborg University in 2005, graduated together from the Royal Danish Academy in 2011 and founded Overgaard & Dyrman at the start of 2013. Their backgrounds explain a great deal. Christian trained as a blacksmith before he studied design; Jasper had explored leatherwork. Their first collection, Wire, married saddlery and precision metalwork, and they have made their own pieces in a workshop in northern Denmark since 2015.

The Circle Collection followed in 2019, and the bar stool is its second piece. The brief they set themselves was the circle itself, a shape they trace from Euclid to Leonardo to Wegner, and the stool is all arcs and soft curves: a fully upholstered seat in fabric or leather on a base of solid wood – oak, smoked oak, ash or walnut – with fittings and footrest in raw or aged brass or stainless steel. CNC machining sits alongside traditional joinery and classic upholstery, and each stool is made to order and individually numbered. In the Danish brands piece I described a line running from Finn Juhl to the studios still working that seam today. This is what I meant.

Limantour Stool – Luteca

The one with a back, and a history it is honest about. Luteca was co-founded by Amanda Réant, its artistic director, and is now headquartered in France with production mainly in Mexico. Its in-house collection draws on twentieth-century Mexican designers who were overlooked in their time, Eugenio Escudero above all, and on the hand-making traditions that grew up around them.

The Limantour belongs to that lineage. It is a Mexican mid-century form: a frame of solid hardwood – walnut, oak or black ash – an upholstered seat, and a back that supports rather than merely suggests. That back matters more than it sounds. The stool you sit on for the whole of a long Sunday breakfast is not the stool you perch on for an espresso, and a kitchen used by a family needs both. The Limantour is the one I would put at the end of the island nearest the window, for whoever is staying longest. It is offered at bar or counter height.

Alexander Street Stool – Philippe Malouin for Man of Parts

The one with a memory of the road. Man of Parts was founded in 2019 by Stephan Weishaupt, a co-founder of the design store Avenue Road, as a collection for a way of living rather than a single look. He works with a small group of designers he has known for years, the Canadian Philippe Malouin among them.

Malouin named this stool after the street in Montreal where he grew up, surrounded by the leather seats of twentieth-century sports cars, and you can see them in it: the ribs, the lines, the perforated leather wrapped over the form. The Alexander Street seating was reportedly the most difficult piece in the launch collection to make, and that shows too, in the best way. It is a counter stool, with its seat at 65 centimetres, and it is the most tailored thing on this list. Where the Tractor began in a farmyard, this one began in a driver’s seat, which seems about right for a stool that spends its life at the edge of the busiest room in the house.

Gentle Barstool – Sebastian Herkner for Linteloo

The one where you can see the maker’s hand. Sebastian Herkner, born in 1981, studied product design in Offenbach, interned with Stella McCartney in London and opened his own studio in 2006. Maison&Objet named him its Designer of the Year in 2019. He also works with Man of Parts, so this is not the first time his name has turned up beside Malouin’s.

Gentle is a family – dining chair, armchair and stool – made for the Dutch house of Linteloo, and the frame is where the story is. For each element, craftsmen model the mould by hand in clay, and aluminium is then cast into it, so the shaping of the person who made the mould survives in the finished metal. It is finished in bronze, and the seat is upholstered in fabric or leather. Cast aluminium usually reads as an industrial material. Here it reads as something sculpted, which is exactly what it is.

What the five have in common

A tractor seat, a circle, a Mexican modernist, a sports car and a clay mould. On paper they share almost nothing – carved timber, brass and leather, hardwood and upholstery, perforated hide, cast bronze-finished aluminium. What they share is that each puts the machine and the hand to work together. The Tractor is cut by a carver and finished by a cabinetmaker. The Circle is machined and then joined. The Gentle is cast, but from a mould somebody shaped. That combination is why all five can be made to a consistent standard and still feel as though a person was involved.

They also pass the test that matters most for a barstool, which is how they behave when nobody is sitting on them. A row of stools at an island is the first thing many people see when they walk into a kitchen. They have to hold the room when they are empty, and then be comfortable enough to keep someone talking long after the plates are cleared.

Our ambition is to improve our clients’ quality of life through good design. This means that each room or space needs a defined function and a reason to exist. The same goes for every chair in it, and perhaps the barstool most of all. Choose it early, sit on it before you buy it, and buy fewer, better ones. Think twice, buy once.