In case you haven’t been keeping up with your Finnish lately, Karuselli translates to ‘merry-go-round’…which is fitting for a spinning chair that brings child-like joy to the adults who have the pleasure of sitting in the Karuselli chair.
Designed by Finnish architect and furniture designer Yrjö Kukkapuro and released in 1964, the timeless piece is a free-form fiberglass structure that is molded to the natural contours of the human body in which Kukkapuro used himself as an anthropometric template.
Upholstered with a detachable leather cushion and mounted to a sturdy spinning base, the chair was an icon of the futuristic style that became popular in the mid to late 1960s along with a trove of other designs such as those from Charles and Ray Eames.
Currently being produced by the manufacturer Artek in Finland, the chair is still a highly-desired piece of furniture design history and is manufactured the same way it was decades ago. In this video from Artek we get a behind-the-scenes look at the laborious process that Kukkapuro himself says is like “manufacturing a small car”:
The chair can be purchased over at Hive for $7,150.
…Just be sure the kids don’t make a merry-go-round out of it.
