Alvar Aalto Kakkonen Chairs

A rare set of six stacking armchairs from one of the pivotal early designs of Alvar Aalto's career. Known as "Kakkonen" – Finnish for "Number Two" – the model was co-designed by Aalto with Otto Korhonen, the owner of the Turku furniture factory that manufactured it. The stacking mechanism built on a design Korhonen had already developed, with legs extending sideways beneath the seat so the chairs could be piled one atop another; Aalto's contribution was to refine that engineering into a more resolved, proportionate, commercially viable object – one of the earliest fruits of a partnership that would go on to define 20th-century furniture design.

Designed and put into production in 1930, the chair belongs to the formative years in which Aalto began moving away from the neoclassicism of his earliest work toward the modernist, functionalist idiom of his mature career, exploring the structural and expressive potential of laminated birch. Yet even as he embraced a pared-back vocabulary, Aalto retained a rounded, softened handling of form that set his work apart from the stricter rigor of contemporary Scandinavian functionalism – an early expression of the humanist approach for which he became internationally celebrated.

Each armchair retains its original metal Finmar tag, marking its import to the UK by Finmar Ltd, and related examples are held in major museum collections including MoMA in New York. Notably, this set exhibits an early construction variant – a rounded, solid-wood seat front and legs mounted against rather than flush with the seat – consistent with a pre-production or prototype phase, before the design was simplified for series manufacture. Complete matched sets of six from this early period are exceptionally rare; most surviving examples surface singly or in pairs.

Designer Alvar Aalto
Description Kakkinen Chair N°2
Date 1930s
Origin Finland
Dimensions 170 x 79 x 71 cm

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