The Floridiana WEBSTR stool reimagines grandma’s utilitarian lawn chair and transforms it for today’s contemporary lifestyle using vibrantly colored, powder-coated aluminum structures and hand-picked vintage webbing.
From our first discussions, we wanted to create a new seating product that embraced up-cycling, and evoked feeling of nostalgia. Through our love of the unusual and forgotten, we came across an icon of classic Americana - the folding lawn chair. This classic staple was owned by most families in the past decades, and was their go-to seating choice for the summer. Lightweight aluminum tubing and polypropylene webbing made it an ideal companion on many trips to the beach, the lake, or anywhere a casual chair was needed. With the development of new materials that were easier and less time consuming to produce than lawn webbing, the industry in North America slowly but surely faded away, leaving behind warehouses full of its once trendy but now discarded product. Our concept came to be by deconstructing the folding lawn chair and modernizing it with a more contemporary shape - a hexagon - all the while staying true to the original materials. However, as opposed to the traditional chairs, we chose to make use of the hundreds of webbing patterns and colors and combine them to create individual monochromatic color stories with a twist, instead of utilizing the standard one or two colors per seat. For an additional pop of color, we've powder-coated our frames in five fresh tones that are inspired by the environment of South Florida: Orchid White, Garden Green, Citrus Yellow, Sunset Blue, and Sea Breeze Aqua. The Floridiana WEBSTR stool was conceived in Miami, inspired by the colors of the tropics and formed by an iconic material.
We feel the time has come to celebrate neglected materials while giving forgotten industrial stock a second life. When the lawn webbing industry closed its doors to manufacturing in North America it left behind miles and miles of perfectly good and still usable surplus material rolled up in the basements of warehouses and storage units earmarked as trash. With the WEBSTR collection, we wanted to take back some of these unwanted rolls of new-old-stock and make reuse of their vibrant colors and super trendy patterns and re-introduce this material back into the mainstream where it once reigned, all the while saving miles of polypropylene from ending up cluttering up our landfills.
