3 reasons why tiny chairs are your friend

Micro-decorating, big results * Issue 7 of 13, A26 * Subscribe *

If I had to give one piece of advice to an aspiring micro-decorator, it would be this: Get some tiny chairs. It's the fastest and easiest way to scale down your ambitions for your home and scale up your fun.

You've probably spotted tiny chairs in previous newsletter articles – I've been collecting them for a while now. But only recently did I stumble across a whole treasure trove that's still settling into my apartment. The alert was an Instagram story from one of my all-time favourite vintage shops, Inabstracto, the tantalizing photo accompanied by a "posting soon" message.

To get ahead of the website listing, I made an appointment to stop by the Little Italy showroom. (If you remember, we toured it last March.) I was dazzled by the colourful crowd of twenty-six design classics:

Though I'd already figured out which ones I hoped to acquire, Julie and Kate encouraged me to take the whole collection. As I thought it over, it made sense: they felt like they belonged together, and what better home than a chronicler of micro-decorating? We worked out a deal, and soon I was heading home in a cab with two carefully wrapped parcels – minus two chairs that will join the rest once repaired.

Playing around with groupings and placements got me thinking about why tiny chairs are such compelling design objects. It comes down to three things.

They're low-effort, high-impact

Hauling full-scale furniture around is a chore, while relocating a miniature is a breeze:

It's no fuss at all to create a configuration that would be daunting in real life:

If you live in a small space like I do, you quickly exhaust the possible furniture layouts. Add some tiny chairs, and suddenly life is full of options again.

They satisfy design cravings

You could spend a lifetime yearning after design grails, while never having the floor space or cashflow to own all your favourites. But if you go small, you can bring lots of those unattainable pieces into your orbit:

You'll happily discover that gazing on the pint-sized versions offers a pleasure eerily similar to looking at the full-sized editions. Sure, you can't sit on them, but so much enjoyment of a room comes from looking anyway.

They recalibrate a room's size

Something funny happens when you add a miniature to a space. Its proportions start to affect how you see everything around it. A windowsill or shelf or tabletop comes to seem massive:

Monkeying with the perceived scale of your living space is a great way to stimulate your imagination.

So where should you go to start or expand a collection of tiny chairs? The gold standard would be Vitra miniatures, made to replicate their full-sized relatives in exacting detail at 1:6 scale. They come in little wooden crates along with an informational pamphlet:

The drawback is price: they're expensive, so much so that some might mistakenly think they're getting a full-sized chair.

If you go this route, I recommend the Panton chair as it comes in a set of five, giving you more drama for your investment:

You can find Vitra miniatures secondhand as well. A few years back, I scored an Eames side chair at Guff for comparatively little. The stylish touch it adds to any surface was well worth it:

You could also consider stores for kids. At Peach Boy on Roncesvalles, I picked up this witty 3D-printed number by Tadashi Studio:

It's available for only $32 Canadian, while the full-scale version it's based on goes for $6,000 US.

IKEA has some finds as well. The Krubbet mobile phone holder doesn't need to be used for its intended purpose – it works just as well as-is:

In the toys section, you'll find play sets that include scaled-down versions of actual IKEA pieces. For example, this Huset set includes a mini version of the Mammut stool, pictured above.

If you're a fan of IKEA's soon-to-be-discontinued Fröset chair, but don't have enough space, you can get a tiny equivalent as part of the other Huset set:

Of course, a trip to your friendly neighbourhood vintage dealer should be the first outing in your quest for tiny chairs. Even if what you discover isn't up to Vitra verisimilitude, it's bound to offer outsized pleasure in an undersized package.

Thank you for reading.