The Tiger Chair

I have dreamt of this chair since 1995.

Not this exact chair — I hadn't met her yet — but the idea of her, formed on my first trip to the Louvre, somewhere between the gilt and the ceilings, when a teenager's brain decided that a Louis XIII chair in tiger velvet was the single most correct object a room could contain. Thirty years is a long time to want a chair, but good god, the payoff!

She turned up at a thrift store in considerably worse shape than the 17th century ever intended. Someone stood on her — an act of violence I choose not to investigate further — and put a foot completely through the hessian. She was, structurally speaking, a crime scene. Cosmetically, she was exactly what I'd been picturing since I was a teenager standing in a museum, very far from home, having a small aesthetic epiphany.

I did what any reasonable person does with thirty years of pent-up longing and a broken chair: I rebuilt her properly, dressed her in tiger velvet, and gave her the legs to stand on — literally — that she'd been missing.

She is, by design, deeply impractical to place. She does not do "neutral." She does not "blend in." She wants a room with guitars on the walls, or one stacked with serious antiques, or one lit entirely in neon. She is not a compromise piece. She is a thesis statement.

Style: Louis XIII-inspired frame, professionally rebuilt from a vintage reproduction Upholstery: Tiger-pattern velvet, fully reupholstered Condition: Restored — new hessian, new structural support, original character intact.

Neither the chair nor Jubes is for sale.