The Ollie Chair: Stylish Seating With A Pull Of The String

It is a great pleasure to write again about one of the most promising design and deco company of our time. For the first time, RockPaperRobot – the New York-based furniture startup – has delighted their customers with the remarkable Float Table, which looks like a giant Rubik’s Cube. Their transformable furnishings address the demands that current physical, cultural, and technological shifts are imposing on both commercial and residential spaces. Now, they are coming back with another masterpiece – The Ollie Chair. It is a chameleon among the seats.

The Ollie Chair unfurls with a flourish and retracts instantly, with just the pull of a string. Elegant and customizable, it’s a versatile primary or secondary seat for homes and businesses, for both inside and outdoors. The chair’s slatted wood seat, called a tambour, allows it to transform between ergonomic and flat profile fluidly. Its aluminum body provides a robust, retractable structure with a sleek look. This furniture suits everywhere – out on the balcony, down at the corner coffee shop, around the co-working table, in a cozy kitchenette, courtside, poolside or even stored side by side on the wall. This full functionality combines with modern style anytime and anywhere!

Let’s stop for a moment and consider what tambour is again. Traditionally used in roll-top desks, a tambour is a flexible surface made up of wood slats adhered to a textile canvas. The chair’s patented transformability relies on origami techniques developed for folding thick materials. By adding offsets and incorporating hinge constraints to aluminum sheet metal, the company engineered a structure that deploys to standard seating dimensions and flattens down to under 2.25” deep. Ollie’s tambour seat attaches to the chair base with three slotted hooks at the top and two ring clips on the back. No tools are required. The Ollie can also hang flat on the wall as an elegant storage alternative. You’ve finally found your space savior!

Besides this, it only weights around 16 lbs (7.25 kg), so the Ollie Chair strikes a balance between portability and substance. Picking up the chair by its painstakingly placed handholds is a cinch for any able-bodied person, making opening and carrying the chair easy.

This furniture startup has made its product weather-proof. They used resistant materials like powder coated/anodized aluminum sheet, stainless steel fasteners and solid, oiled teak from the start. They salt tested, immersion-tested, froze and thawed their product to make sure your Ollie Chair could brave all the elements. Last but not least, The Ollie Chair is safe and posture-protecting as well. It meets industry-set safety and durability standards. Ollie’s lumbar-supporting contours have been evaluated by people of all sizes, seated for long and short periods.

Currently, RPR is crowdfunding its product on Kickstarter. They’ve already met their goal, but you can still pre-order The Ollie Chair for $300. The company is presently offering custom versions for Kickstarter but, in the future, they aim to provide different materials, too. For large orders, they hope to do custom branded graphics. Thus, don’t hesitate and grab a chair!