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 my teenaged 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 wait, but good god, the payoff!

She turned up at a thrift store in unfortunate shape. Someone stood on her — plainly an act of violence — 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 and dressed her in tiger stripe velvet.

She is, by design, deeply impractical to place. She is not "a neutral." She does not "blend in." She wants a room with guitars on the walls, or one stacked with serious antiques, or one with metallic gold walls. At my house, there are all three, and she sits very comfortably here.

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.