Léon Stynen - SL58 chair - 1958

The SL58 is the iconic chair by Belgian architect Léon Stynen(1899-1990). This most famous furniture design by Stynen, which he realized together with his assistant Paul de Meyer, was brought to the market to  the occasion of Expo 58 by the Antwerp company Straatman, Loral en Cie. It is a timeless classic of Belgian design: an elegant chair with tubular steel legs and a seat shell made of pleated plywood. A beautiful design reduced to pure simplicity and continuity.

The architect and urbanist Léon Stynen is one of the key figures of modernism and functionalism in Belgium. Inspired by Le Corbusier, he immersed himself in an architecture of straight lines and rectangular surfaces. An architecture characterized by functionality and spatial layout. He was successful at an early age, realizing numerous and diverse projects for over fifty years, from the early 1920s until the end of his professional career in 1977. He built casinos, elderly homes, cinemas, schools, office buildings, villas. The Knokke casino is one of his earliest projects, while the Antwerp Royal Conservatory of Music, later the International Art Center deSingel in Antwerp, is one of his latest achievements.

Léon Stynen was also active as a designer and furniture designer. He designed numerous pieces of furniture, often for specific interiors, but few pieces are still on the market today. Original SL58 seats are very rare. A chair with a universal design language, a true witness to pure modernism, which perfectly summarizes Stynen's functional style.

Based on the fine suiting tweeds used in high fashion garments, Sonar 3 presents a complex and sophisticated mixture of colours and texture. The textile’s dominant tones are tempered by the inclusion of complementary and contrasting colours to produce a subtle and elegant overall effect.

Inspired by the distinctive combinations of colour associated with 1950s cinema, fashion and interiors, tobacco browns come spiked with polar white and duck egg blue; three tones of grey are lifted by soft white laced with thin threads of buttercup yellow and black. Powdery greens, blues and pinks take on an added dimension with fine threads of black, white and red.