History of the Club Chair
Arm chair
Up until the seventeenth century a chair was just a chair with a wooden seat and back, unless it was a throne. Then furniture makers began adding arms and upholstery to make chairs more comfortable, as well as lowering seats from "dining" height. People started using the description "armchair".
In the eighteenth century there were highbacked padded chairs for the rich or those in need of extra comfort. Even when padded, they didn't have that "sink-into-it" comfort that would come in the next century.
Easy Chair
It was the Victorians who invented the fully-sprung, fully-upholstered easy chair and in this period the classic, deep seated, well padded, low backed club chair developed. The designers did not have the same status as cabinet-makers and so their names have not been handed down, although some manufacturers' names add to the value of a Victorian chair.
Club Chair
The word "club" in club chair harks back to the gentlemen's clubs in nineteenth century England where a gentleman could go to get away from his household (including womenfolk). Once there, he would sink into a well-upholstered leather chair and relax with a drink and perhaps a cigar. The names of the fashionable London streets full of such clubs are still used to name classic club chairs : St. James, Piccadilly and so on.
Many Victorian leather club chairs were button-backed, companion pieces to Chesterfield sofas (also a nineteenth century design). A dictionary definition of a club chair is "A heavily upholstered easy chair with arms and a low back". Although any fabric can be used to upholster them, leather, being the quintessential gentleman's furnishing material, has been consistently popular.
Overstuffed chair
In the twentieth century, the club chair developed in two different directions. One possibility was a traditional "overstuffed" chair, perhaps with a sofa as part of a matched suite, which could be covered in cloth as well as leather.
Overstuffed in a furniture context doesn't mean too stuffed, just very well padded. By contrast, there were also streamlined modern designs, notably by architect Mies van de Rohe. Even more innovative was the other famous design from the 1920s : the Bauhaus Wassily chair, named for artist Wassily Kandinsky.
Art Deco Club Chair
Art deco club chairs became popular and are particularly associated with France, although in the French tradition, these may be more formal and less bouncy than chairs from Britain or the USA.
In the 1950s the Eames chair was introduced as a fresh American interpretation of the traditional English club chair. Nowadays the traditional leather club chair is very popular.
But it's not all tradition. Innovation continues. An example is Philippe Starck's Bubble Club Chair, a twenty-first century contribution to the evolving design of club chairs.
