Designer: Roger McLay 

Materials: Plywood, steel, rubber stoppers, screws. 

Manufacturer: Roger McLay

Tongue and Groove Collection

In a 1992 interview, McLay explained that aircraft-grade plywood was readily available after the war when most other raw materials were in short supply. Unlike the well known moulded plywood work of Charles and Ray Eames, McLay’s design used the natural tension of a laminated sheet to form the seat, with additional moulding not necessary. To assemble the chair, the plywood sheet is bent, lapped, and glued. Simple J-clips were used to hold the cone-shaped seat to the four-legged base. 

Roger McLay (1922 – 2000) trained initially at the National Art School, Sydney, and then took up an apprenticeship with John Sands in lithography. During the 1939 - 1945 war he enlisted in the RAAF before returning to the Art School from 1945 - 47.  When the Kone chair was put into production in 1948, and sold from McLay’s studio, word spread quickly among Sydney’s small community of Modernists…After a career designing lighting graphics and other work, McLay retired in 1987. His archives are kept in Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum. 

Text from “Roger McLay and the Kone Chair” by Michael Bogle, Australiana, August 1993

Designer: Douglas Snelling (1917-1985) 

Materials: Silver ash and cotton webbing 

Manufacturer: Functional Products 

Tongue and Groove Collection 

Douglas Snelling, an English born, self-taught designer, moved to Australia in 1942. He had travelled widely and worked as a designer in the United States during the Second World War. This exposure to the latest in American architecture and design inspired his own work when he returned to Australia in 1946. In 1947, the Snelling Line of furniture went into production in Sydney. This inexpensive and stylish furniture was very successful in a market poorly supplied with quality design. 

Snelling’s synthetic fibre, parachute-webbing armchair became the signature item of the range. It was produced in various forms: on rockers with laminate arms, without arms or with small, plain arms. The webbing came in five colours: cyclamen, fawn, brown, catalina blue and cactus green. In 1955 a more durable replacement webbing called Saran was found, also in a range of translucent, bright colours. 

Source: Designing Australia: Readings in the History of Design (2002)

Designer: Gordon Andrews 

Materials: Plywood, rubber, upholstery fabric and cast aluminum legs. 

Manufacturer: Gordon Andrews 

Tongue and Groove Collection 

This example of the Rondo chair is one of approx. 200 hand-assembled by the designer. It features a plywood shell and cast aluminum legs. In 1960, the shell was replaced by sheet steel and the legs replaced by a steel spider base. In 1969, a spun aluminum base was added.

Gordon Andrews (1914 – 2001) is best known for designing the first decimal currency bank notes that were released in Australia on 14 February 1966. He was also one of Australia's foremost industrial designers and a designer of international significance. He worked in Britain and Italy, as well as Australia and was the first Australian designer to be elected as a Fellow of the UK Society of Industrial Artists and Designers (1955). He was also awarded membership of the Faculty of Royal Designers for Industry and the Alliance Graphique Internationale. 

Text from “One Hundred Modern Chairs” by Terence Lane, National Gallery of Victoria 1974.

Designer: Grant Featherston

Materials: Plywood, fibre, horsehair, wadding, rubber, hardwood and upholstery.

Manufacturers: Grant Featherston, Emerson Bros Pty Ltd, E & F Industries Pty Ltd and licencees interstate and in New Zealand.
Tongue and Groove Collection 

"Featherston had been dreaming of making a chair which would be a ‘negative’ of the human body. The obvious material for the shell of this chair was plywood, because it was light flexible, inexpensive and readily available. He found that, by sawing pieces of the right size and shape from a flat sheet of plywood, the sheet could be bent into a form fitting shape, and that by curving and joining with other pieces of shaped ply, fragile material could be made incredibly strong.” (1) 

When complete, the Contour range comprised over twenty-five pieces of seat furniture with accompanying occasional and dining tables and cabinet furniture. At the height of its popularity it was made under licence interstate and in New Zealand… It had pride of place in the 1950’s Australian home and was featured in decorator magazines and architectural journals as well into the 1960’s. 

(1) ‘Australian Furniture Trade Journal”, March 1955. 

 Text from “Featherston Chairs” by Terence Lane, National Gallery of Victoria.

Designer: Grant Featherston 

Materials: Steel, plywood, Sarmprene foam and upholstery. 

Manufacturer: Aristoc Industries Pty Ltd 

Grant Featherston saw his chairs as a sculptural form, to be appreciated from all angles. This is particularly true of the Scape chairs where the petal-like back and seat shells were mounted on a tapered steel tube frame. The number of structural members in Scape was reduced and there was only one traverse cross-rail. The sweeping contoured shells appeared to be poised on or cantilevered out from the frame. 

“The extreme simplicity of the frame of a chair such as Scape”, noted one reviewer “is possible only in steel. Modern materials and techniques have made possible a chair of apparent lightness and fragility, which is in fact stronger and more comfortable than it’s bulky predecessors”. – Good Living, January 1961. 

Text from “Featherston Chairs” by Terence Lane, National Gallery of Victoria 1988.

Designer: Clement Meadmore (1929-2005) 

Materials: Stainless steel, leather 

Tongue and Groove collection 

The design of this chair grew out of an interest in the possibility of using the sling principle in an anatomically correct fashion, and in a way which would intrinsically include armrests. The steel structure consists of three parts: the back brace and uprights welded into a single unit, and the two front elements, each of which is attached with two screws, thus locking the leather sling in place. Because the leather is in a loose sling form, seamed between the seat and back contact areas, there is no stretching in use, and no restriction of body movement, even though the sling is virtually form fitting. 

Source: Clement Meadmore, The Modern Chair, 1974

Designer: Kjell Grant (1929 ) 

Materials: Stainless steel, fiberglass, latex foam, polyurethane foam, vinyl. 

Manufacturer: William Latchford and Sons, Box Hill 

Tongue and Groove Collection

Originally commissioned by Robin Boyd for the Australian Pavillion at the Montreal Expo (1967) and inspired by the stance of the kangaroo, only around 400 chairs were manufactured. The Montreal Chairs were also featured at the Osaka World Fair in Japan and are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. 

Born in Scotland in 1929, Grant has worked in Australia as a freelance designer for almost 50 years. In that time he has established himself as a leading product and interior designer. Grant’s extensive product design enterprises include clocks, lighting, marine fittings, petrol pumps and service stations, vending machines, commercial furniture systems, television and sound equipment. 

Kjell Grant is the President of Melbourne Movement, which he formed in 1998 to promote works of design excellence by Industrial Design graduates of universities in Melbourne. He also directs the Industrial Design furniture studio and design studies for final-year students at RMIT University.

Designers: Grant and Mary Featherston 

Materials: Polyethylene, ABS. steel, foam rubber and upholstery. 

Manufacturer: Furniture Makers of Australia (formerly Aristoc Industries Pty Ltd)

Tongue and Groove Collection 

Grant and Mary Featherston worked for eighteen months, against considerable odds, on the Stem Chair. Despite the “ever-widening use of plastics in other fields”, they found that the Australian furniture Industry still had, ”its head in the sawdust”. “Plastics”, wrote Grant Featherston, “most ideally meet the requirements of modern technical production, which seeks to increase the function properties of a product, while decreasing it’s mass, number of components and cost” (1). Furniture Makers of Australia with the assistance of ACI Plastics, succeeded in producing the chair which with it’s rotationally- moulded high density polyethelene shell, was one of the most technologically sophisticated chairs ever made in Australia. 

High technology aside, the chair continued the nature-inspired theme in Featherston’s work, drawing from flowers, shell and seedpod forms. Beautifully proportioned and finely balanced, it invites comparison with Eero Saainens’s Tulip chair of 1956. 

(1) Industrial Design Council of Australia, IDCA Design Report, 1971. 

Text from “Featherston Chairs” by Terence Lane, National Gallery of Victoria 1988.