TBA chair by Christophe Gevers

In addition to the SL58 chair designed by Léon Stynen, the King Baudouin Foundation’s Heritage Fund also acquired this emblematic chair in the history of Belgian design.

Christophe Gevers (1928-2007) created the TBA chair in 1959 as part of a project to refurbish the Taverne des Beaux-Arts, the tavern at the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles. It was an immediate success. In the same year, the chair was awarded Le Signe d’Or, the Belgian seal of quality.

The start of the Golden Sixties marked the arrival of Gevers in the world of design and interior design. As a designer and interior designer, Christophe Gevers went on to create numerous interiors of renowned Brussels brasseries and restaurants, including the Taverne des Beaux-Arts (1959), the Vieux Saint-Martin in the Sablon (1968) and the Porte de Namur site of the Quick hamburger chain (1984). He also refurbished numerous banking agencies, as well as designing a large collection of furniture and lighting.

Gevers’s work is characterized by the use of new raw materials, which became more elegant over the years. The TBA chair is a simple, tubular piece of chromed steel, with a seat and back in leather, stitched with white nylon. Gevers particularly chose a non-coloured leather that would darken and become softer with use over time. At the back and under the seat of the chair, he used nylon thread to stretch the leather. He frequently returned to this model, including it in other projects, so that we now see it in various chairs. The use of new materials, as well as floating armrests endow Christophe Gevers’s chair with a particularly modern allure and the chair, which launched his career, remains in absolute terms, one of his most beautiful creations.

The furniture that Christophe Gevers designed has often been replaced or disappeared over the years, so this acquisition by the Heritage Fund enables us to preserve an important element of 20th century Belgian design. This chair has been entrusted to the Design Museum Brussels, where it will be in dialogue with other furniture made by Belgian designers acquired by the Fund in 2019, as well as with furniture from the 1950s that is part of the museum’s permanent collection, including work by Jacques Dupuis, Jules Wabbes, Willy van der Meeren and others.