You Can't Sit in These Tiny Replicas of Iconic Chairs. You'll Want Them Anyway

Some of history's most iconic chairs are already considered works of art. The Vitra Design Museum's 1:6 scale miniature replicas let you enjoy them on a purely aesthetic level.
Miniature Eames Lounge Chair and Ottoman

It's difficult to find aesthetic beauty in a functional object that you use every day. Corkscrews, milk jugs, boomerangs – they're all amazing works of art in their own way; it's just that most people are too busy using them to stop and take notice.

Chairs are different. Along with cars and telephones, they've always inhabited a different plane of the form/function continuum. They are signposts and showpieces for entire eras of design – the materials they use, the production techniques they're built with, and the aesthetic sensibilities they represent.

The history of chair design is punctuated by easily identifiable pieces such as the Viennese cafe chairs of Michael Thonet, the bent-plywood and molded-plastic chairs of Charles and Ray Eames, and the Aeron chair designed by Don Chadwick and Bill Stumpf. But throughout history, big-deal chairs haven't just been designed by big-deal chair designers. Some of the most iconic seats have been created by architects, artists, and legends of industrial design: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, Salvador Dali, Dieter Rams, Frank Gehry, and Philippe Starck.

Some chairs are already considered pieces of art that you're permitted to sit on. But just in case you need a full separation of form and function to appreciate them aesthetically, the Vitra Design Museum has a solution. They make miniature replicas of some of history's most iconic chairs, and they've done so for about 20 years. You can't sit in them. But you can place them on your desk and admire them as works of art.

Don't mistake these for superficial lookalikes, either. Each of the chairs in the Vitra Miniature Collection is made with the same materials and moving parts as the original pieces. Sixty-nine chairs are currently available as part of the Vitra Design Museum Shop's U.S. catalog, and each piece is an exact 1:6 scale replica of the real deal.

In comparison to the full-size versions, the price for each chair has also been hit with a shrink ray. But temper your expectations, because they're still very expensive.

The cheapest mini-chairs you'll find are a tiny three-piece polyamide set of Ronan & Erwan Bouroullec's Vegetal chair priced at $185 per trio or a lilliputian version of Frank Gehry’s Wiggle Side Chair for $145.

And should you want a miniature version of the leather-and-plywood Eames Lounge Chair or Marc Newson's aluminum Lockheed Lounge, you'll need to sit down in a full-sized chair before reading the prices: They cost $755 and $1,400, respectively.