The Salon De Luxe - High Back Chair

Designed exclusively for the Salon De Luxe, everything about these chairs is resplendent and luxurious. Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald's choice of lavish materials meant that in 1903 these chairs cost three times as much as the chairs in the rest of the building and as such were never utilised in other properties. Labour-intensive and challenging in design, with elegant tapers, petal and square motifs and curves throughout, the finished pieces are monuments to exuberant style: to sit in one of Mackintosh's Salon De Luxe chairs is to be transported to another world.

As an artist Mackintosh was less interested in the natural properties of a material, such as the grain, than the aesthetic contribution they could make to the 'total artwork'. Almost all surviving original Salon de Luxe chairs had been repainted numerous times, so a sample of the original finish was retrieved from underneath a coat hook on a Salon De Luxe coat stand held in the Glasgow School of Art. This aided Character Joinery in their aim to recreate as closely as possible the colour and sheen of these striking, throne-like chairs. A similar piece of good fortune enabled the makers to examine a sample velvet from Margaret Macdonald's sewing box to match fabric for the seating pad. The result of such meticulous research and careful construction is a spectacular item encapsulating Scottish craftsmanship and flair. 

CHARACTER JOINERY
MATERIAL: OAK, VELVET, HORSEHAIR, GLASS
WHITE UNDERCOAT PRIMER x2, GOLD SIZE, ALUMINIUM FLAKE (mixed with resin, in a technique similar to gilding) VARNISH x2, (buffed and polished to a high sheen) HAND-TOOLED