CHEZ CHAISE TAKING THEIR CUES FROM HISTORY, DESIGNERS ARE REINTRODUCING THE CHAISE LONGUE FOR ITS STYLE, VERSATILITY, AND OF COURSE, COMFORT THIRD Edition

• Published in: The Boston globe
• Main Author: Hakala, Sonja
• Format: Newspaper Article
• Language: English
• Published: Boston, Mass Boston Globe Media Partners, LLC 14.04.2002
• ISSN: 0743-1791

IN1800, FRENCH ARTISTJacques-Louis David painted a portrait of Juliette Recamier, a young woman whom many regarded as the toast of Paris. Through the French Revolution and into the regime of Napoleon, Madame Recamier's salon served as a gathering place for the city's political and cultural elite. In Madame Recamier, David's brush caught her beauty, her carefully tousled curls, her bare feet, and the details of a reclining sofa the French named the chaise longue. When it appeared, the image of Recamier's cushioned island of repose sparked an interest among the furniture-conscious that swept across Europe. Today, the chaise longue enjoys a popularity that Recamier would certainly approve of. In addition to comfort, chaises offer flexibility. "A chaise can float in almost any space, because it's made to be approached from all sides," says Todd Huckabone of Donghia's New York furniture showroom. "With the push toward cocooning, now more than ever, people want to express themselves through their home spaces, and the chaise is flexible enough to use in many ways." Variants of the chaise longue turn up everywhere in furniture history. Long before 17th-century French furniture makers began refining the chaise longue's common ancestor, the daybed, into its more luxurious cousin, ancient Greek artists posed gods and goddesses in reclining positions on chaiselike sofas called klines. In fact, the kline was a variation of an Egyptian bed used for dining. In their turn, the Romans took a shine to the kline, though history records that the hard surface of theiradaptation, the lectus, did not recommend itself for repose. In the late 18th century, the chaise longue jumped the English Channel and was embraced by the British. Several variants appeared. In France, the duchesse was a well-cushioned chaise longue with a distinctive rounded back. The duchesse en bateau added a lower, upholstered foot with a curve to match that of the head. The French duchesse brisee became a fad in England through the 19th century. It was essentially a chaise longue in two pieces, one a well-endowed armchair, the other an upholstered ottoman the same height as the chair seat. Sometimes, a duchess, as the English called it, came with a second chair to sit opposite the first with the ottoman in between. These three pieces could be attached to one another or used separately.