About this product
An interesting piece from Architectural Digest about the background of the chair and why it’s a favourite with designers: “After Italian designer Joe Colombo visited a shipyard in 1963 that made fiberglass hulls for boats, inspiration struck: Why not use that same hand-molding technique for the base of a chair?
The results—a roomy, futuristic armchair in which seven detachable cushions hook into a molded plastic shell on a rotating base—would become an icon. He named it after his wife, Elda.
Colombo moved a white fiberglass and black leather model—produced by Italian brand Comfort in 1965—into his own Milan apartment. And soon, after the design debuted at the Eurodomus 1 fair in Genoa, others followed suit.
The strange chair (further documented in Joe Colombo: Designer: Catalogue Raisonné 1962–2020, a new publication by Silvana Editoriale) captured the 1960s space-age sensibility of fashion designers like Paco Rabanne and Pierre Cardin, and was on its way to the silver screen, where AD100 designer Luis Laplace first saw it.
The appeal is wide-ranging. Designer Hollie Bowden, who snapped up a worn-in Elda in Morocco for a project in Ibiza, calls it “super comfy and quite bosslike.” Meanwhile, designer Jonathan Adler, who lives with one in his Manhattan home, calls the seat “a strange mix of plastic futurism and organic brainlike channel upholstery in a commanding scale.” Or, as he has deemed it, “executive squish.”
View more midcentury modern design here.
