CategoriesFurniture and Lighting
Chaise Lounge
A long seat for reclining with the legs raised, known in French as the chaise longue and in its many forms as daybed, récamier or lounger.
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About
Reclining furniture is ancient: Greek and Roman diners lay on couches at banquets. The French chaise longue, literally long chair, took shape in the 17th and 18th centuries, sometimes as a duchesse brisée split into an armchair and footstool. Jacques-Louis David's portrait Madame Récamier (1800) shows its sitter on a scrolled daybed, and the name récamier stuck to that type. The English lounge came from a mishearing of longue.
Modern designers used the form to test new materials and ideas about rest. Marcel Breuer shaped a bent plywood Long Chair for Isokon in the mid-1930s, Poul Kjærholm stretched cane over a steel frame for his PK24 (1965), and Marc Newson's riveted aluminium Lockheed Lounge (1986) turned the chaise into a sleek, almost liquid sculpture. Look at how the frame supports the knees and neck, and whether the angle adjusts.
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