Is This the ‘It’ Chair of 2023? Interior Designers Think So
Folksy wooden seats that hail from midcentury Europe and Scandinavia—which some design pros are calling brutalist in style—are showing up everywhere
3 min
AN UNFUSSY and downright brutish, midcentury vintage chair design has been muscling its way into even the most traditional of homes lately. Though no cozy La-Z-Boy, the seat is getting high marks for a wabi-sabi style that celebrates imperfections, thanks to exposed bolts, obvious joints, plain-Jane planks and unpolished wood. Some look like little more than two pieces of wood attached to legs, but keyhole details or sculpted backs can make them sweeter. Designers and dealers are calling the increasingly in-demand seats, which hail primarily from Scandinavia and Europe, brutalist. At online marketplace 1stDibs, searches for “brutalist chair” are up 115% year over year.
“These mid- to late-century chairs are raw, organic and almost harsh,” said Maureen Ursino, an interior designer in Colts Neck, N.J., who’s been buying them for clients because they add “a contemporary element in not too intense of a way.” Recently she placed a single Danish pinewood chair, likely a survivor of the 1970s, in the bathroom of a Larchmont, N.Y., home. “I used it as a decorative accent, as though it were a piece of art,” she said.
Heidi Caillier planted an oak example from Germany in a child’s bedroom in San Francisco. The Seattle-based designer welcomes “the sense of patina” the seats bring to a project: “Like maybe this chair has been in this family for years and keeps being passed down but also is not too precious.”
Though this simple wood chair is unquestionably trending, skeptics take issue with its equally buzzy “brutalist” label. Florence de Dampierre, author of “Chairs: A History” decries that description as sloppy. “Brutalism refers to an architectural style from the ’60s, of concrete,” she said. “The term for this kind of modern chair might more appropriately be handicraft.” Meanwhile, Los Angeles interior designer Martha Mulholland traces its influences to the rustic modern Scandinavian simplicity of Axel Einhar Hjorth and 18th-century Tyrolean furniture. (The Future Perfect, a retailer of collectible pieces, labels its examples above as such.) “The beauty of the design is in the simplicity of seeing the wood grain and joinery detail,” said Ms. Mulholland. She prefers to classify the seats as European Primitive Modern: “I would say the chair is more primitive than brutal, but it’s a matter of semantics.”
At Chairish, a reseller of vintage design where interest in the terms “brutalist” and “wabi-sabi” are building, Noel Fahden Briceño, vice president of merchandising, says European dealers first applied the term. Although the name is being used loosely, she said, “when dealers started titling these chairs ‘brutalist,’ I said, OK, I can see that.”
Whatever you want to call the seats, designers are embracing the little brutes because they are unexpected. “I like that they feel unrecognisable,” said Ms. Caillier. “So many chairs have become trendy and overused, but it’s hard to find the same one of these chairs more than once.”
The design is also proving quite versatile. “There is a boldness and sharp sculptural quality to them, and they can hold their own in any room because they are simple,” said Ms. Mulholland. “They can cover a lot of ground aesthetically.” She recently used a couple of primitive three-legged walnut chairs underneath the living room windows of a home in Los Angeles’s Lafayette Square. The historic Craftsman home boasts its original unpainted mahogany woodwork. “I was playing into that masculinity,” she said, “but I also liked the contrast of putting the chair up against a pink velvet drape.”
The chairs’ roughness tends to clash intriguingly with softer, more feminine elements like that. This visual dissonance has helped fuel their popularity. “You can use one chair as an accent piece, even if the rest of the room is refined,” said Ms. Fahden Briceño.
Ms. Ursino says these chairs are not known for their coziness and may need a little help—she upholstered the seats of brutalist chairs she set around a game table to boost their comfort. Other designers are stationing them around meal tables, however. Los Angeles interior designer Lauren Piscione placed eight barrel-backed examples in a dining room, their rugged homeyness contributing to the calm of the space.
In a Tudor revival by Seattle interior designer Lisa Staton, a family of five pulls up oak versions made in the Netherlands in the 1970s. A depression in the seat makes them quite comfortable, said Akash Niranjan, the father in the household. “We work from home three days a week and often find ourselves sitting at the dining room table for long stretches and have not had any issues,” he said. “Our three young kids like them as well.”
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From making unpopular decisions to learning when to listen, leaders from five businesses reveal what nobody prepared them for — and how running a company has challenged their expectations.
Technology and semiconductor shares fell sharply as investors questioned the debt financing the AI infrastructure boom and confronted higher rates and Chinese competition.
Elon Musk is exploring a potential merger between Tesla and SpaceX, a deal that could reshape the future of AI, robotics, autonomous vehicles and space technology. With a combined valuation potentially reaching $3.5 trillion, the move could bring Musk’s vision of an interconnected technology ecosystem closer to reality, although a deal remains uncertain.
5 min
Elon Musk has engineered ties between Tesla TSLA 3.41%increase; up pointing triangle and SpaceX SPCX 7.79%increase; up pointing triangle that are hard to break, and now he wants to fuse them together permanently.
Musk has run both Tesla and SpaceX concurrently over the past two decades, using a schedule that dictated which days he spent focused on each business.
The companies have often shared resources and personnel, signaling their close ties. Last year, SpaceX looked into creating a spacesuit for Tesla’s humanoid robot Optimus, a person familiar with the matter said. Tesla last week showed off its new Roadster, a vehicle featuring SpaceX rocket thrusters that it hopes to soon bring to market.
And in recent months, Musk has repositioned both companies by expanding beyond their core operations toward a shared mission centered on artificial intelligence.
The world’s richest man on Tuesday signaled his interest in tying up SpaceX and Tesla, marking what would be the biggest corporate merger of all time. Because he serves as chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla, Musk said committees of independent directors at both companies are evaluating a possible deal, adding that a transaction might not come to fruition.
The committees will likely evaluate, with lawyers and bankers, how each company would fare in a potential deal and how a deal might best be structured. They then present their conclusions to their respective boards, who typically vote on whether to proceed.
“It’s an odd Kabuki dance where two groups of people are talking and I can’t be in the conversation,” Musk told SpaceX investors on Tuesday in response to an analyst’s question about a potential deal.
For Musk, the merger supports his vision of a world full of autonomous cars, humanoid robots and weekly rocket launches, as well as the data centers and satellites required to keep the whole thing running.
Some investors and analysts said they expect a transaction would be structured as an all-stock deal, with SpaceX potentially paying a modest premium for Tesla shares.
SpaceX, which has a market value of about $2 trillion, said it is seeing sharp growth in revenue across its businesses, which include operating data centers, launching rockets and operating satellite networks such as the internet service Starlink. Tesla is valued at about $1.5 trillion and is expanding its operations beyond its automotive and energy business. Shares in both companies traded higher following the news Tuesday.
Musk’s substantial ownership stakes in both companies, along with voting control at SpaceX, has enabled him to set the deal in motion. Analysts and investors said the deal will probably face regulatory scrutiny internationally, though some see Musk’s close relationship with the Trump administration as an asset to getting approval.
Blurred lines
The companies haven’t said which directors are on the special committees evaluating a potential deal. Several SpaceX and Tesla board members have either personal or business ties to Musk. And like Musk, venture capitalist Ira Ehrenpreis sits on both boards.
In a filing this week, Tesla outlined millions of dollars in business agreements with SpaceX and its subsidiaries last year, including $143 million in car sales to SpaceX, $3.3 million in advertising that it bought on the social-media platform X and $430 million in revenue from the sale of Megapack batteries for SpaceX’s data centers.
The companies also split the cost of resources including the use of Musk’s SpaceX jet and the bill for his personal security, which he runs through a private company.
Employees at both companies routinely move between companies to work on special projects, and some executives have dual roles, including Charles Kuehmann, vice president of materials engineering at both SpaceX and Tesla, and Ashok Elluswamy, the vice president of AI software at Tesla who runs a joint venture with SpaceX called Digital Optimus.
Over the years, Musk has launched new startups within his empire, including brain-implant company Neuralink, underground-tunnel developer the Boring Company and xAI, the AI startup that merged with SpaceX in February.
It is that AI business that Musk thinks can serve a market worth tens of trillions of dollars, justifying the need for a merger.
The business case goes like this: Tesla is developing robotaxis and robots, which it calls “physical AI.” SpaceX is working on the back end of physical AI: the data-center capacity and internet connection required for those robotaxis and robots to operate continuously.
“I don’t see what the value of Tesla is if it’s not merged with SpaceX,” said investment adviser Ross Gerber, a former Tesla bull turned critic invested in both companies. “If they don’t merge, the brains of everything that runs Tesla is owned by another company.”
On top of it all, both companies face constraints on the supply chains they need to make this world a reality, particularly when it comes to chips. To address this, Musk earlier this year announced a joint venture between Tesla, SpaceX and Intel to design and manufacture chips in Texas. “The most epic chip-building exercise by far,” he has said.
Musk at the wheel
For Musk, a merger would also solve two problems: demands on his attention and his lack of control at Tesla.
Tesla for years was Musk’s only public company, a status that came with greater scrutiny. There, Musk reports to a public board, as well as individual investors who make up around 30% of Tesla’s voting power, according to FactSet.
The question of Musk’s attention became a particular focus for investors and the board in recent years after he acquired Twitter in 2022 and launched xAI in 2023, and again in 2025 as he spent time in Washington, D.C., running the Department of Government Efficiency in the early months of President Trump’s second term.
As Tesla’s car business suffered in 2025, Musk threatened to take his AI ambitions outside the company if he wasn’t granted 25% voting control. Last November, Tesla shareholders approved a new pay package for Musk, which created a path for him to vastly expand his stake.
As of Sept. 30, Musk owned a roughly 20% stake in Tesla, according to the company’s proxy filing.
The SpaceX IPO gave Musk a different path. When SpaceX went public in June, the deal’s structure enabled him to have more than 80% voting power at the company—so much that he can’t be fired and decisions can’t be made without his support.
If SpaceX acquires Tesla, he will likely stay in control.
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