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Having a comfortable seat is a bit like giving a soul to your home, and a chaise longue is a good compromise between a comfortable seat and a unique piece of its kind: an emblem of comfort and ideologically, a symbol of the conquest of a personal space, the chaise longue is the queen of hybrid furnishings because its S-shaped line allows a body position halfway between sitting and lying down, offering a state of relaxation suitable for both rest and conversation, depending on where you place it and on your state of mind.
Not surprisingly — Freud's experts know this! —, the chaise longue is still today a key piece of furniture in psychoanalysis studies, and not only for hypnosis, a technique already very popular at the end of the 19th century, which was carried out by making patients lie down on a special bed or chaise longue in order to relax better. if in this specific case a soft padding was preferred, over time the chaise longues have been made in the most disparate materials and styles; just think of the Lockheed Lounge, signed by Australian designer Marc Newson: made of aluminum and fiberglass, it is currently the most expensive chaise longue in the world, having been sold for 3.7 million dollars in a 2015 auction! To see it "in action", check out Madonna's video for her single Rain, a true 90s cult.
Since its origins, the chaise longue has represented an innovative type of furniture, remaining a staple of trendy interiors. This type of seat entered the glossary of design as early as the ancient Greeks, in the form of an elongated chair, used by philosophers for their lessons: it was called “longa”, hence the Italian term “cislonga”. However, it is commonly called by its French name chaise longue, also because it was in France, in the 18th century, that it became fashionable in its Louis XV specimens, which exhibited elegant elaborate wooden structures, backrest and armrests. The evolution of this structure took place in the neoclassical period (Louis XVI), where the armrests began to disappear and the chaise longue got closer and closer to the 20th century types, made in multiple materials and kinds of padding, and which reached peaks of originality in their forms, as in the case of the rare Ravi Sing's chaise longue, designed in the 90s and based on a single, sinuous piece of fiberglass and copper.
In addition to its versatility, there is another value the chaise longue took on in the 20th century, which is its being a potential symbol of the professional affirmation of many long underestimated women designers. At the end of the 20s, French designer Charlotte Perriand (1903-1999), a style icon, and today recognized as a star of the global vintage market, applied for a job at Le Corbusier's studio at the age of 24. The hasty reply she got was "We don't embroider cushions here". Shortly thereafter, Le Corbusier was stunned by a series of aluminum, glass and leather furniture reinvented as a bar and displayed at the 1927 Salon d'Automne exhibition in Paris. The author, who had originally designed them for her own apartment, was Charlotte Perriand, who at that point was hired by the studio, giving rise to the legendary ten-year collaboration with Le Corbusier and his cousin Pierre Jeanneret. The rest is history: a partnership that culminated in the creation of a group of iconic pieces, just like the LC4 chaise longue produced by Cassina since 1965: extremely sought-after in the vintage market, this timeles piece was originally called B306 and had been produced by Thonet from the 30s.
