The OVO High Chair: A Baby Seat Shown at MoMA

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Baby furniture rarely gets serious design attention — a high chair is usually judged purely on safety, ease of cleaning and price, not on who designed it or where it's been shown. The OVO high chair from the Spanish brand Micuna is a genuine exception: a real studio design, first shown at a design week rather than a trade fair, that's gone on to be exhibited in actual museums rather than only ever appearing in a parenting retailer's product photography.

The company behind it

Micuna was founded in 1973 in Valencia, Spain, by Francisco García Moreno and his wife María Eugenia, starting as a small workshop. It's credited with introducing Spain's first wooden cribs, and still manufactures from a real 35,000-square-foot factory near Valencia's Mediterranean coast rather than outsourcing production — its furniture is handcrafted there, not assembled from imported components. From that single Valencia base, Micuna now exports to more than 35 countries — genuine international reach for a company that's never relocated production or outsourced manufacturing to a lower-cost country, unlike a lot of furniture brands that keep a European name while building everything elsewhere.

A real studio, not an in-house sketch

The OVO chair was designed by Culdesac, a Valencia-based design studio, and first presented publicly at Valencia Design Week in 2011 before entering production in 2012. Its distinctive rounded, egg-like shell — the source of the name, from the Latin ovum — is built from polypropylene with solid wood legs and detailing, finished with washable fabric padding, an adjustable tray and an adjustable footrest. The construction genuinely evolves with the child: the same frame converts from an infant high chair into a toddler chair rather than being replaced outright, which is a real practical design decision rather than a marketing claim about "versatility."

CuldeSac itself is a real, established multidisciplinary studio, not a one-product outfit — set up in 2002 by four founding partners, Francisco Pons, Alberto Martinez, Pepe Garcia and Pilar Roger, working across graphic design, product design, retail and architecture. Its client list includes the Spanish porcelain house Lladró (CuldeSac's booth design for them won Best Interior at the Valencia International Furniture Fair in 2005) and the American manufacturer Bernhardt Design, for whom the studio designed the Whisper chair. The OVO high chair sits inside that same portfolio rather than being an outlier commission from a studio better known for something else entirely — CuldeSac treats a nursery chair with the same seriousness it brings to a porcelain-house showroom.

Real museum recognition

The OVO chair has been shown at MoMA in New York and at the IVAM (Institut Valencià d'Art Modern) in its home city — genuine design-world recognition for a category of furniture that almost never receives it. That distinction matters here specifically because it's rare: baby furniture is one of the most purely functional categories in the whole industry, and very few pieces in it ever get treated as objects worth a museum's attention rather than just a parenting-store shelf. It puts the OVO in genuinely unusual company — most furniture that ends up in a museum design collection is a chair, lamp or table intended for adults, made by a studio actively chasing that kind of institutional recognition, not a nursery product designed primarily to be bought by exhausted new parents shopping on safety ratings and price.

Where the range has gone since

Micuna has extended the original OVO into a small family of related chairs rather than treating it as a single product — the OVO Max City and OVO Max Luxe variants keep the same evolving-chair concept and rounded silhouette while adjusting size and finish for different budgets and spaces. All three remain in Micuna's current range, sold direct and through retailers including Williams Sonoma in the US, rather than being a design-week piece that never reached real production. The fabric seat pads are also sold as standalone replacement parts — a small but genuine sign of a product built to be kept and reused across siblings rather than replaced outright once it looks worn.

For other real design collaborations that took a genuinely unconventional brief seriously, see our pieces on Scavolini's Living Crystal kitchen, patterned by Karim Rashid, and FIAM's Ghost chair, built from a single sheet of glass.