Lounge chair and footstool, Glasgow model

Thanks to the Marie-Jeanne Dauchy Fund, an iconic furniture ensemble by the Brussels designer Georges Charles van Rijk has been acquired. The lounge chair and matching footstool complete the collection at the Brussels Design Museum.
 

A signature ensemble

This ensemble, called Glasgow, comprises a lounge chair and matching footstool and was designed by Georges Charles van Rijk in 1968. It is a perfect representation of 1970s Belgian design and is today almost as famous as the name of its designer. The Ets A. & L. Verhaegen was commissioned to make the early examples, including this one with chrome tubing. From 1971 onwards, the tubes were trimmed with black leather.

Simplicity and comfort

The ensemble’s design, with its plump lines, demonstrates the style of a period when simplicity was combined with originality, yet without forgetting the comfort offered by the rounded seat, which recalls the famous Bibendum, the eponymous Michelin tyre man promoted in advertising campaigns across Europe during the mid-1960s. The apparent simplicity of the lounge chair and its footstool belies the careful and meticulous sculpting of this piece of furniture. As elegant from the front as in profile, the chair invites the user to rest in comfort.

An iconic piece

Whilst the chair known as Shelby is well-known by design amateurs, it is the Glasgow ensemble, made in the same year, that is resolutely sought as van Rijk’s iconic design. Moreover, the presence of the footstool, which is often missing when this model appears on the market, makes the chair even more desirable.

Georges Charles van Rijk

Georges Charles van Rijk was born in Brussels in 1933 and was an industrial and interior designer. His early furniture designs of the 1950s, with their streamlined and aerodynamic structures characteristic of the time, evolved towards more curved and rounded lines during the 1960s. In the 1970s, van Rijk discovered a passion for photography and at the end of the 1990s became an artist and painter. However, he did not abandon designing and worked with young designers and interior designers such as Hélène Van Marcke from 2005 up to his death in 2015.

Entrusted to the Brussels Design Museum

This ensemble has become part of the permanent collection that illustrates the history of design in Belgium at the Brussels Design Museum. It is now exhibited alongside other pieces of inestimable value, of which several were acquired by the Marie-Jeanne Dauchy Fund, which is dedicated to the safeguarding, conservation, protection, restoration and promotion of Brussels cultural heritage.