The Filo Chair

A distinctive chair made with a blend of solid beech wood and flexible fabric rope.

Following their previous three collections designed for Matiazzi, French designers Ronan and Erwan Bouroullec created another stylish piece of furniture for the Italian company. The Filo chair draws inspiration from typography, a detail that becomes more obvious when admiring its silhouette from one side. Made from beech wood, Filo boasts a distinctive seat and backrest created by wrapping fabric cord over the timber frame. The contrast between the solidity of wood and the flexibility of the rope give the chair a distinctive character. The repeating lines also reinforce the graphical presence of the design. The flexible fabric slightly distorts with the user’s body, adding a softer, personal accent to the chair.

Filo features a frame specially designed to reduce waste; minimalist and clean, the wood structure explores the purity of essential forms while providing maximum strength with cleverly designed joints. The chair pushed the two brothers to move out of their comfort zone and create something different. “After some years of work for Mattiazzi, we tried in this research to apply what we learned from the years before. I think FILO is very well composed in the sense of its lines, the tension and the radius, but it’s a bit more square than our usual work,” says Ronan Bouroullec. Beautiful on its own or in a set, Filo comes in a range of versatile colors. Customers can choose between gray, black, and dark green or the more eye-catching mustard yellow versions. Photography© Gerhardt Kellermann, Matiazzi.