The Calla Chair: William Sawaya's One-Piece Plastic Classic for Heller

Home / Chairs

Plastic chairs are usually forgettable. The Calla is the exception: a sculptural, stackable, one-piece chair designed by the Lebanese-born architect William Sawaya for the American company Heller, which has been shown in museum collections and picked up a design award within two years of launch.

The idea: Panton's chair, forty years on

The Calla was designed in 2001 as a deliberate update of the idea behind Verner Panton's injection-moulded monoblock chair of 1960 — a single moulded shell that could be made cheaply in large numbers, stacked for storage and used indoors or out. Sawaya set out to do the same thing with forty years of better plastics technology behind him: a chair with a more flowing, sensual shape than earlier plastic seating, but one that still worked as an affordable, mass-produced object. One early write-up called it "quietly aggressive" — a design that looks calm at first and then reveals how much tension there is in its curves.

The chair is moulded from one piece, which is the point: no frame, no joints, no separate seat. Accounts of the material differ — early write-ups describe injection-moulded polycarbonate, and some museum and dealer records list it as fibreglass-reinforced polypropylene — so if the exact plastic matters to you, ask the seller which version they mean. It came in black, white, red and a transparent finish. Heller's published dimensions are 80 cm high, 47 cm seat height, 56 cm wide and 60 cm deep, and the chairs stack up to six high.

The designer

William Sawaya was born in Beirut in 1948 and graduated from the National Academy of Fine Arts there in 1973. He worked in France, Italy, Greece, Japan and the United States, and settled in Italy in 1978. Together with Paolo Moroni he built Sawaya & Moroni in Milan — an architecture, interior and product-design practice (founded in 1978 by one account, with its design showroom opening in 1984; sources differ on which counts as the start) that also produces and directs art and design exhibitions. One of the better-known things the firm does has nothing to do with furniture: since 1999 Sawaya & Moroni has hand-made the FIFA Women's World Cup trophy, now across six editions.

The company: Heller

Heller was founded in 1971 by Alan Heller, and its very first product explains a lot about its approach. Alan Heller had come across a set of stackable dinnerware designed in 1964 by Massimo and Lella Vignelli — a design that had won Italy's Compasso d'Oro, but whose original Italian manufacturer had closed. He set up a company to keep it in production, and "Hellerware" became the foundation of the business. It was later added to the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. From there Heller invited other well-known architects and designers, including Mario Bellini and Frank Gehry, to design for it. The company's logic is consistent: take a strong design, make it in good plastic at a fair price, and let it stay in production.

The Calla fits that tradition exactly. It's design-led, mass-producible and meant to be used hard — Heller describes it as an indoor and outdoor chair, and a set of four is far more at home on a terrace than a leather armchair would be.

Recognition

The Calla received a 2003 ID Annual Design Review Design Distinction Award from ID magazine, and a Calla side chair (model number 1005) is in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (see the museum's own record); another is held at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (now Newfields). Heller's earlier note that the chair was reintroduced in 2007 suggests it dropped out of production for a few years and came back, which is a better sign of a chair people wanted than a continuous run of an unremarkable product.

Buying one

New Calla chairs are listed through Heller's own furniture site and a number of design retailers, though stock varies. There's also a healthy secondhand market: pairs and sets of four regularly appear at auction and through vintage dealers, usually in matte black or white. Check carefully for scratches and for the yellowing that can affect older white plastic, and note that a handful of unrelated "Calla" dining chairs from other furniture brands are sold under a similar name — the Heller chair is the one credited to Sawaya.

For comparison, FIAM's Ghost chair is another one-material, one-form seat from the same Italian design world, cut from a single sheet of glass instead of moulded from plastic; and the shell of Micuna's OVO high chair is built from polypropylene in much the same spirit. For a very different route to mass-produced design, see our piece on the Wassily chair, still made by Knoll nearly a century after Marcel Breuer drew it.