Chairs
By Judith Miller
Conran Octopus, £40
FT bookshop price: £32

Judith Miller is well-known to FT House & Home readers as one of the writers of its monthly Something Old, Something New feature and a respected antiques expert and author of many books, including the invaluable Miller’s Antiques Price Guide. Here she focuses on a single topic and presents it in a very different format from her antiques guides.

This 336-page hardback has a short foreword by Sir Terence Conran, whose own seating designs span the past half-century, followed by a 17-page historic overview of chairs from ancient Egypt through to post-modern and contemporary work. The rest of this hefty tome is devoted to 106 selected designs with a full-page, colour image of a single, beautifully photographed chair facing a page of text describing the design’s history, style, construction and significance.

It has a format that works well. The chairs are presented in chronological date order, starting with a Wainscot armchair of 1680 and ending with US designer Wendell Castle’s futuristic Nirvana from 2007. En route we visit an American Queen Anne wing chair, Louis XV fauteuil, country ladderback, Regency dining chair, Thonet bentwood armchair, Eileen Gray’s Bibendum, Arne Jacobsen’s Ant, the Campana brothers’ Favela and Philippe Starck’s Louis Ghost. A fun, informative source-book with universal appeal.