Thonet is a historic furniture company founded by the German–Austrian cabinetmaker Michael Thonet (1796–1871), who opened his first workshop in Boppard on the Rhine in 1819. From the 1830s he experimented with bending wood, developing a process of steaming and forming solid beech into strong, lightweight curves that allowed chairs to be made from standardised parts rather than carved components. After moving to Vienna, he and his sons established Gebrüder Thonet in 1853, and by the 1850s and 1860s their bentwood café chairs were being exported internationally and shown at world’s fairs.
The firm’s best known design is the No. 14 café chair, introduced in 1859, assembled from a small kit of bentwood elements and widely regarded as the first mass-produced modern chair, with millions made by the early twentieth century. Thonet later added tubular-steel furniture associated with the Bauhaus, working with designers such as Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe, and the company continues today as Thonet GmbH in Frankenberg, Germany, producing classic bentwood and tubular-steel pieces alongside new designs.
