Le Corbusier

Le Corbusier was born Charles-Édouard Jeanneret in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, in 1887, and died in 1965. Architect, painter, urban planner, polemicist. He adopted the pseudonym in 1920, roughly the age at which most people stop reinventing themselves.

He is quoted more often than he is read, usually as a house is a machine for living in. The line is generally taken as cold, which misses what he meant by it: a machine is designed around what it has to do, and so, he argued, should a house be — and so should the furniture in it.

The furniture was a collaboration, and the credit is often wrong

The 1928 furniture range was designed by three people working together in the Rue de Sèvres atelier: Le Corbusier, his cousin Pierre Jeanneret, and Charlotte Perriand, who had joined the practice that year at the age of twenty-four. Perriand did much of the actual design work and, for most of the twentieth century, got almost none of the credit. Any account of the LC series that names only Le Corbusier is telling you three-quarters of the story.

The range was shown at the 1929 Salon d’Automne in Paris as part of an installation called the Équipement intérieur d’une habitation. It included the LC1 sling chair, the LC2 and LC3 armchairs, and the piece that outlasted all of them: the LC4 chaise longue, originally catalogued as B306.

Why the LC4 has no mechanism

Most reclining furniture solves the problem with a lever, a ratchet or a gas strut. The LC4 does not have one, and the absence is the design.

The seat is a continuous curve of chrome-plated tubular steel, shaped to follow the line of a body from the head to the calves. It rests on a separate black base rather than being fixed to it. Rubber contact points stop it sliding. To change the angle, you move the frame along the base by hand — from near-upright to nearly flat — and your own weight holds it there. Nothing to adjust, nothing to break, and no position that is not available to you.

The bolster headrest slides along the frame in the same way, so you set it wherever your neck actually falls rather than wherever a designer assumed it would.

Production went to Thonet in the 1930s and, from 1965, to Cassina in Italy, who still hold the licence.

What it needs from a room

At L160cm this is the least forgiving piece we sell, and it is worth being honest about why. It is not a chair. It does not work in a conversational group around a coffee table, and putting it in one wastes it. What it wants is a dedicated run of floor: along a bedroom wall, in a wide bay window, or angled into the corner of a living room with 60cm of clear walkway on the side you get in from.

The reclined angle puts your head back and your feet up. That is comfortable for one person reading, and awkward for two people talking. Buy it for the first thing.

Because the frame is open and raised off the floor, it reads lighter in a room than 160cm of anything usually does — but the chrome is bright, reflective and dominant, so check it against the other metals you already have.

Ours come in two leathers, under LC4 style chaise longues, within the wider lounge chair range.

A note on what we sell

Habitat Furnishes is not affiliated with, endorsed by or licensed by Cassina or the Fondation Le Corbusier. Our chaise longues are described as “LC4 style” or “Le Corbusier inspired” because they are our own reproduction of the design, built to the specification published on each product page.