Rover chair

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The Rover chair is Ron Arad’s first piece of furniture, created in 1981. It mixes a real car seat with a steel frame, making it a postmodern design. The red leather seat comes from a Rover P6 car, and it sits in a curved black steel frame, originally made from Kee Klamp pipes. The frame also forms the chair’s feet and armrests. Arad found the parts at a London scrapyard after leaving an architectural firm.

Produced by One Off and later by Vitra, the chair sold for about £99 in 1981, roughly three times its production cost. Hundreds have been made since, and the Rover chair has become an icon that helped launch Arad’s career. A two-seater version followed, and in 2008 Vitra released two models.

The chair is about 78 cm high, 69 cm wide and 92 cm deep. It has appeared in major exhibitions around the world, including the Barbican and Design Museum in London, Paris’s Centre Pompidou, and New York’s Museum of Modern Art.