The Wallpaper Chair Arch, in association with ercol, for the London Design Festival has been designed by Martino Gamper, bringing a stunning modern interpretation to it.
Martino Gamper was born in 1971 and brought up in Merano in the Italian Alps, close the German border. After a teenage apprenticed to a Merano 
furniture maker, he travelled round the world, often paying his way with his joinery skills. Having studied at the Fine Arts Academy in Vienna, he freelanced in Milan for various design studios, including Flos, Villeroy & Boch and Lavazza. He then moved to London in 1997 to study at the Royal College of Art and has lived in London ever since.
Martino has a fondness for objects with a story to tell, creating one-off pieces of furniture out of disparate materials gathered from friends, London streets and skips. This was illustrated on a monumental scale in his exhibition 100 chairs in 100 days, where pieces from an assortment of chairs were rearranged to create one hundred new hybrid pieces. Recently, Martino reinterpreted the c
lassic Thonet chair as part of the Conran Shop’s Inspiration Show, launched during last year’s London Design Festival. He took piece parts from the Thonet chair and combined them in wonderful new ways to create a series of surreal new pieces.
In his reinterpretation of the chair arch, he has produced a stunning modern piece of art, with its two overlapping spans of stacking chairs, that will form a centrepiece at the V&A this September. On 10th September Martino spent the day at ercol spraying the brightly coloured stacking chairs for the arch (main picture) – you can see more photos of this on our flickr site.
Martino Gamper http://www.gampermartino.com
LDF Chair Arch: http://www.londondesignfestival.com/content/wallpaper-chair-arch
ercol Flickr site: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ercol
