Czechoslovakian Type 830 Armchair with Gold Velvet by Josef Hoffmann for Ton, 1960s

Born in 1796 in Boppard am Rhein, Germany, carpenter and furniture designer Michael Thonet is famed for the invention of bentwood—a revolutionary process that played a key role in the development of the modern design movement.

Thonet opened his eponymous woodworking shop in his hometown in 1819. In the early 1840s, he began experimenting with bending and gluing laminated battens together, which resulted in the Boppard Chair (1841), the first furniture design to use bentwood.

During an exhibition at the Koblenz Fair in Germany in 1841, Chancellor of Vienna Prince Metternich discovered Thonet’s work and convinced him and his family to relocate to Vienna. Between 1843 and 1846, Thonet and his sons made parquet flooring for Carl Leistler and helped to furnish Liechtenstein Palace and Schwarzenberg Palace. In 1853, the company became Gebrüder Thonet (Thonet Brothers), in honor of Thonet’s five sons who would eventually inherit the hugely successful business.

In 1859, Thonet designed his company’s most renowned piece, the classic Chair No. 14, which is internationally known today as the Viennese Coffeehouse Chair. With this design, Thonet had evolved and refined his bentwood process to enabled mass production for the first time in history. Having sold over 50 million models by 1930, the No. 14 is the world’s bestselling chair.

During the 1860s, the Gebrüder Thonet opened subsidiaries across Europe. Other design classics include, Chair No. 04 for Café Daum (1849), Rocking Chair No. 1 (1860), No. 18 (1876), No. 209 (1900’s)—widely used by Le Corbusier in the 1920s—and Otto Wagner’s 247 (1904).

Thonet’s revolutionary designs inspired many designers— including Le Corbusier, Josef Hoffmann, Adolf Loos, Marcel Breuer, Alvar Aalto, Yngve Ekström, Otto Wagner, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe—and his process allowed for the creation of elegant, lightweight, curvilinear designs that anticipated the minimalist forms associated with modernism.

By the time Thonet passed away in 1871, Gebrüder Thonet had branches in nearly all major European cities. Today the company is known as Thonet GmBh and is headquartered in Frankenberg, Germany. 

Architect-designer Josef Hoffmann was born in 1870 in Prinitz, Moravia (now Brtnice, the Czech Republic). He studied architecture at the Senior State Commercial and Technical School in Brünn (now Brno, Czech Republic). After a year of practice in Würzburg, Germany, he moved to Vienna, the city where he would remain for the rest of his life. He enrolled in the Academy of Fine Arts there, and, between 1892 and 1895, studied under both Karl von Hasenauer and Otto Wagner. From 1896 to 1897, he worked in Wagner’s Vienna studio. He also became one of the founding members of the Vienna Secession, a group of artists (including Gustav Klimt, Carl Moll, and others) who favored a modern, experimental approach to the arts. Hoffman’s contributions to several Secession exhibition installations, all influenced by the Art Nouveau-Jugendstil style, helped establish his name. In 1899, he was appointed a professor at Vienna’s Kunstgewerbeschule, a position he held until his retirement in 1936. He taught in the school’s architecture, metalwork, enamel, and applied art departments.

Around 1900, Hoffmann became a proponent of the Gesamtkunstwerk (or total work of art) approach, exemplified through unified architecture and interior design, with an emphasis on craftsmanship. He was cofounder and co-artistic director, alongside Koloman Moser, for the new Wiener Werkstätte (Vienna Workshops) beginning in 1903. In 1905, he left the Secession, and received the commission to design the Palais Stoclet in Brussels. Completed in 1911, the Stoclet was arguably Hoffmann’s most important architectural project.

Throughout his prolific 50-year career, Hoffmann designed everything from textiles to furniture, fashion, jewelry, exhibitions, and buildings for prestigious clients like Lobmeyr and Lötz. Later in his life, he focused primarily on housing projects. Aesthetically, his work evolved from Jugendstil to more minimal, geometric forms and then on toward neoclassicism.

He died in Vienna in 1956.

TON is the Czech heir to the legacy of bentwood innovator Michael Thonet, who established a furniture factory in Bystřice pod Hostýnem in 1861. In 1953, the factory was nationalized by the Czech government, and the company was renamed TON, an acronym for “Továrna ohýbaného nábytku” (in Czech, “Factory for bentwood furniture”).

TON’s bentwood forms are characterized by clean lines, reduced ornamentation, and an emphasis on functionalist principles. The brand continues to manufacture classic and contemporary furniture designs to this day.