All Photso By Gail

Industrial designer Joey Zeledón used Bauhaus Leglend Marcel Breuer’s ‘Cesca chair as a inspiration for this innovative seating design that combines the famliar continuous steel rod frame with colorful coat hangers replacing the classic cane seat and back. Spotted at 2023’s International Conetmporary Furniture Fair (ICFF), the Coat Check Chair allows the user many possibilites for personalizing the frame to suit their taste.

Zeledón recalls, “Sketching pen to paper all the different ways [that] I could make a chair out of plastic tubular hangers was fun, but it would prove to be trivial if the hangars snapped or the chair couldn’t hold a person’s weight.”

Coat Check Chair on Display at ICFF

“Using whatever I could find in the closet and shop during my studio course at Rochester Institute of Technology,” he continues, “I whipped together a usability prototype to test the weigth capacity. Turns out, when stacked together, plastic hangars can hold quite a bit of weight. It worked!”

From there, I experimented with different proportions using PC piping and hangars. Next, I made a works like/looks like prototype that involved me cutting, bending and welding together steel tubing into what would be become a twist on the classic Marcel Breuer design. At the time, my vision was to create a chairframe  that was inspired by the steel closet rod.

Using this tubular steel cantilever frame design, I was also able to maintain and promote the utility of the hangers, which could create the seat and back of the chair in an impermanent way, meaning that hangers could be added and removed as needed for hanging up coats.

Read more about how the design of the Coat Check Chair developed (and see more photos without people in them!) at This Link.