Designer: Eero Aarnio

Designed: 1966

The Ball Chair (also known as Globe Chair) was designed by Eero Aarnio in 1966 and hand made by him. In 1966 the Ball Chair was presented at the international furniture fair in Cologne and it was the sensation of the fair. It’s a very unconventional shaped chair – it looks like a hollowed out ball, fixed on a leg. Sitting in its interior makes you feel like in a “room within a room”, having your own privacy, in a calm atmosphere, isolated from noise. However, the chair can turn around its own axis, which gives a choice to the user: turn around and exclude yourself from the world around you, or face the room and the people in it. The Vitra Design Museum notes: “It is something between a piece of furniture and a piece of architecture and at the same time embodies both the mobile and the established, the fixed.” It’s completely cushioned in fabric.