The Wassily Chair: Still Made by the Same Company, Nearly a Century Later

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Marcel Breuer designed the Wassily chair — officially the Model B3 — in 1925–26, while he was head of the Bauhaus's cabinet-making workshop in Dessau, Germany. The origin story is genuinely mundane for such an influential design: Breuer had just bought his first bicycle, and was struck by how light and strong its tubular steel frame was compared to traditional wood furniture construction. He worked out how to bend and join tubular steel using the techniques local plumbers already used, and built the chair around that material rather than around a stylistic idea. Most of what gets repeated about its name is wrong, too: the chair was not designed for the painter Wassily Kandinsky, who taught at the Bauhaus at the same time. Kandinsky simply admired the finished design, so Breuer made him a duplicate for his own quarters — the "Wassily" name only got attached decades later, when Italian manufacturer Gavina reissued the chair and uncovered that anecdote during its own research into the design's history.

How Knoll actually ended up with it

The ownership chain is real and traceable, not just "Knoll makes it now": Gavina acquired the rights to Breuer's original B3 design in 1962 and gave it the Wassily name during that reissue. Gavina went bankrupt in 1968, and Knoll International bought the company along with its trademark and manufacturing rights that same year — the chair has been in continuous Knoll production ever since, which means the current version has now outlasted the company that first put the "Wassily" name on it by nearly six decades.

Who actually makes it today

Knoll is the answer, and has been for a genuinely long time. Knoll was founded in 1938, and in 1945 moved its production out of New York to an old mill in East Greenville, Pennsylvania — a site the company still manufactures furniture at today, one of four Knoll production facilities in North America. The Wassily chair is produced under the KnollStudio division, the specific arm of the company licensed to manufacture historic designs by figures like Breuer and Mies van der Rohe rather than Knoll's own in-house contemporary lines. Every genuine example carries Breuer's stamped signature on the frame — a small detail, but a meaningful one, since it's the actual difference between a licensed Knoll chair and one of the many unlicensed tubular-steel reproductions the design has attracted over the decades.

The company itself changed hands significantly in 2021: Herman Miller acquired Knoll in a $1.8 billion deal that closed that July, and the combined company renamed itself MillerKnoll that November. Knoll continues operating as one of MillerKnoll's constituent brands — alongside names like HAY, Muuto and Design Within Reach — rather than being folded into a generic house line, and East Greenville has kept making furniture through that ownership change rather than being consolidated away. As of a 2021 expansion announcement, Knoll was actively growing its Pennsylvania manufacturing footprint, not winding it down — a genuine signal that a 96-year-old design is still a commercially serious product for the company making it, not a legacy item kept in production out of sentiment.

Why it never got redesigned

What makes the Wassily chair worth knowing about specifically, rather than just another old design still technically in production, is that it hasn't needed a redesign in almost a century — the same staying power behind FIAM's Ghost chair, an even more extreme case of one material defining a design completely. Knoll manufactures it essentially unchanged from Breuer's original 1925 drawings — the same tubular steel bending technique he borrowed from bicycle and plumbing construction, the same leather or canvas sling seat and back. That's a genuinely rare thing in furniture: most "iconic" pieces that stay in production get quietly reworked over decades for manufacturing efficiency or modern ergonomics. The Wassily chair's design was resolved correctly enough the first time that eighty years of furniture manufacturing progress hasn't found anything worth changing.

Genuine examples are sold directly through Knoll's own Wassily chair listing and its authorised dealers — a new, authenticated Knoll chair, chrome-plated tubular steel with a leather sling seat and back, retails from around $2,000. Vintage examples from Gavina's original 1960s production turn up on the collector market too, typically anywhere from around $1,100 to $6,000 depending on condition and rarity — worth knowing if a "vintage Wassily" listing turns up, since it's a genuinely different (and often more expensive) thing than a new one, not simply a cheaper alternative.

For another chair with a real, well-documented design history rather than a marketing myth, see our piece on the story behind the Wishbone chair — a different design tradition entirely (Danish, not German), but the same standard of genuine provenance behind a piece that's still in production today. Or stay with Knoll and Mies van der Rohe directly: the Barcelona chair is the other half of the same design lineage, built for a royal reception in 1929 and still hand-tufted from a single hide today.