Design Icon

Locally made, internationally adored, Emeco chairs transcended their utilitarian origin and have become a ... design icon

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If you think there’s something familiar about these chairs, you’ve been paying attention. You might have seen them in the interrogation room on Law & Order, during a brainstorming session on House, or starring front and center in the Britney Spears video for her hit “Stronger.” You may have even noticed them in Martha Stewart Living. But you’re probably not aware that these chairs are designed and manufactured right here in the Susquehanna Valley. It’s true: These celebrity chairs hail from Hanover, and from there, they’ve gone, so to speak, global.

Handmade by Emeco [pronounced EH-meh-co], these chairs are not only famous, they’re indestructible—and they’re iconically stylish. They’re versatile, enduring and resilient. Also, they’re very, very green. As in, they were already green back when a “green house” meant a place where you grew seedlings.

So it is for these key attributes of sustainability, durability and panache—not necessarily in that order—that Emeco chairs have become recognizable worldwide. While some do end up in obscure places, like old government offices and the odd vintage shop, they’ve also been featured on the big screen in The Adventures of Tintin, Jurassic Park, and on the small screen in Candid Camera and Sex in the City. Other high-profile cameos include movie scenes with Clint Eastwood and Jodi Foster. These chairs could tell some stories.

The Emeco chairs were selected for these roles for various reasons, but what really put them on the style map was a chance encounter with a phenom designer named Philippe Starck.  Emeco president Gregg Buchbinder bought the company from his relatives in 1998, and it was in 1999 that he attended a trade show in New York City and met the man who would help transform Emeco into the high fashion legend it is today. Their collaboration was not exactly a makeover, but it had the same astonishing effect.

Starck had used Emeco chairs in several projects, such as the Paramount, a boutique hotel in Times Square. He was completing the plans for another posh New York hotel, the Hudson, and he had been wanting, of all things, to design an Emeco chair. He promptly created a new chair and stool model and put in an order for a thousand of them. The Hudson was born.

“Emeco’s client list today would make anyone jealous: Estée Lauder, McDonald’s, Google, Simon Cowell ...”

Word got out. The Hudson is now just one of several chairs Starck has designed for the company; this has led to a barrage of requests for “a Starck-designed chair” and to partnerships with other fashionable designers, including Frank Gehry.

To put this in context, these two designer/architects are known for enriching the global cityscape with striking, concept-rich structures and objects. Starck has designed everything from a Fossil watch to housewares at Target to a space vehicle to the interior of the Elysée Palace for Francois Mitterand. Gehry, for his part, has been called the most important architect of our age; his installations include the titanium-covered Guggeneim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, and the Dancing House in Prague.

How it all began

While this is impressive, Emeco is unique not just because of who designs its chairs, how they look, or where they end up, but also because of their eco factor and their suitability for tough environments. The story goes that a very specific need during World War II prompted the first big design. “Everything started with the Ten-06,” says purchasing agent Pete Harmon of their most iconic chair. Pete, who has been with the company since 1966, explains, “Years ago the Navy needed a chair made out of nonmagnetic materials. It had to be lightweight and durable. We came up with this chair back in the ’40s.”

The Navy’s requirements for its submarines and Navy boats meant chairs not only had to be durable and lightweight, they had to resist hard wear (think explosions) and salty moisture and be made of materials that enemy ships couldn’t detect. Also, they couldn’t interfere with the Navy’s own sensitive onboard equipment. Satisfying all this was the perfect challenge for the then-Electric Machine and Equipment Co., whose founder, Wilton Dinges, had begun working with chair designs in his basement in 1944.

The Ten-06 was designed and produced, and Emeco began receiving massive orders from the government for anywhere from schools to hospitals to prisons. This kept the Emeco craftsmen hopping for years, but there were two problems with this business model. One, the chairs were so durable the government never had to replace them. Two, it depended heavily on one client, even if it was the United States government; after the Vietnam War, the military orders contracted, and a new direction was needed.

Fortuitously, that’s when the designer angle began driving the sales and visibility of Emeco chairs. When the sustainability movement kicked in and the original chair became retro-chic, their popularity exploded.

Emeco’s client list today would make anyone jealous: Estée Lauder, McDonald’s, Google, Simon Cowell, Baccarat crystal, and the Smithsonian. A recent order, for 2,500 chairs, came in from Disney. It’s like everyone, everywhere, wants an Emeco chair. Walk through the company’s staging area and you’ll see labels for Singapore, Milan, Brussels and Japan.

As compelling as their clients and locales is what the chairs are made of—and how they’re made. A lot of chemistry (shrinking molecules and such), along with hours of detailed hand work, happens during Emeco’s 77-step process (you can watch a video of the process on their website, www.emeco.net). Briefly, this involves taking aluminum, a soft metal, bending and shaping it, heat-treating it in 960-degree molten salt, shocking it in cold water and then baking it overnight in an oven. A day and night like that makes these lightweight chairs three times the strength of steel by weight (Emeco’s chairs weigh only about 8 pounds; a steel chair this strong would weigh three times more). Next the chairs are anodized, which converts the aluminum to

diamond-hard aluminum oxide, sealing and protecting the chair’s surface against scratches, rust and other challenges.

Super Green

Sustainability-wise, it’s a strong story as well. These chairs are made from 80 percent post-consumer and post-industrial waste. The manufacturing process has been honed until it, too, is uber-environmentally correct. A joint collaboration with Coca-Cola, called the 111 Navy, is made from 111 recycled plastic bottles. Introduced in the summer of 2010, it’s already diverted almost 4 million bottles from landfills.

Once the chairs are built, they’re also 100 percent recyclable. But you’re more likely to include them in your will because, quite frankly, these chairs will outlast all of us. They’re guaranteed for the life of the original owner, rare in any industry; the company estimates they’ll last about 150 years. In that century-and-a-half Harmon says the chairs won’t “scratch, bend or break.”

“They’re durable,” he observes, shrugging, in the understatement of the year. On their Extreme Testing webpage, you can watch as an aluminum chair plummets from a third-story window, is catapulted against a cement wall, and suffers other equally violent acts. (Purchasers are encouraged to send their own roughhousing chair videos to the Emeco “cinema.”) Human resources manager Barb Foulk recalls, “There was another test with bullets, for whatever reason. I’m not quite sure what that was about.” Foulk’s own white, powder-coated Ten-66s endured outside by her built-in

pool for years. “They’ll last,” she asserts. “They don’t rust, the aluminum takes the rain, they’re exposed to the chlorine, and they really hold up.”

An Evolving Style

Meanwhile, back at the literal drawing board, Emeco’s head of development and production Denis Tangen “plays all day long,” reconciling designers’ ideas with structural requirements to generate up to 30 prototypes, until a design crystallizes. “Sometimes we don’t even have time to make the final drawing,” he says. “Sometimes the chair is the drawing.”

Tangen’s favorite chair? “The next one.” That next model is being honed as this issue goes to print. It’s designed by award-winning architect Jean Nouvel and has yet to be named. Come April, Emeco will be unveiling that version and the new Sezz chair at the International Furniture Show in Milan, Italy. Originally custom-designed for the Hotel Sezz-Saint Tropez on the French Riviera, the Sezz riffs in a new direction, with a formed aluminum sling-type shell that looks like it belongs in a sci-fi movie.

Emeco’s offerings, which now include tables, rockers and stools, incorporate wood, plastic and upholstery as well as aluminum. Last year’s newcomer, called the Lancaster, featured reclaimed ash from Lebanon, Pennsylvania. No matter what material or shape the chairs take, though, there is one way to tell whether you have an authentic Emeco: Check the base of the seat back. Each one is stamped with the name of the company and the designer, like a sculpture. Likewise, Tangen calls the chairs works of art.

Some of them are priced like works of art—they run anywhere from $400 to almost $4,000. Each chair takes 50 hands eight hours to make, and polishing them to a high sheen adds another eight. (The company makes, on average, 100 chairs per day, almost completely by hand; that’s roughly a million chairs since 1944.) On the high end are the extremely shiny versions that transform Emeco’s Kong stools into what Dinges called “sculptured masterworks.”

So is the Emeco story about art or is it about function? Is it a story of sustainability, changing with the market, or making some of the most famous chairs in the world? Perhaps the most compelling story for most of us, if we’re honest, is the celebrity factor. When you think of the big names who have employed Emeco chairs, it’s no wonder they’re sought after. The custom Navy chair Britney Spears used in her video? It was auctioned on eBay for $100,000. Harmon jokes, “If she would sit on just two chairs a day, I’d have it made.”

The Emeco Experience