Discover the Story Behind Joe Colombo's Beloved Elda Chair

MagazineDiscover the Story Behind Joe Colombo's Beloved Elda ChairThe iconic fiberglass space-age creation is a favorite among designers

By Hannah Martin

December 9, 2021

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The Paris atelier of Luis Laplace and Christophe Comoy.Nicolas Mathéus

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After Italian designer Joe Colombo visited a shipyard in 1963 that made fiberglass hulls for boats, inspiration struck: Why not use that same hand-molding technique for the base of a chair?

The results—a roomy, futuristic armchair in which seven detachable cushions hook into a molded plastic shell on a rotating base—would become an icon. He named it after his wife, Elda.

The designer with his 1965 creation.

Studio Joe Colombo

The designer with his 1965 creation.

Longhi

Colombo moved a white fiberglass and black leather model—produced by Italian brand Comfort in 1965—into his own Milan apartment. And soon, after the design debuted at the Eurodomus 1 fair in Genoa, others followed suit. The strange chair (further documented in Joe Colombo: Designer, a new publication by Artbook) captured the 1960s space-age sensibility of fashion designers like Paco Rabanne and Pierre Cardin, and was on its way to the silver screen, where AD100 designer Luis Laplace first saw it.

“In the 1969 film Hibernatus, a man sitting in the Elda armchair explains the challenges and benefits of hibernation,” recalls Laplace of his early-childhood encounter with the seat. He and partner Christophe Comoy now live with one in Paris. Elda went on to star in the 1977 Bond flick The Spy Who Loved Me, in the 1970s series Space: 1999, and in the 2012 movie The Hunger Games, proving Laplace’s point: “It oozes power.”

A vintage Elda in Alexander Werz’s Milan home. 

Giulio Ghirardi

A Joe Colombo Elda chair in the Greenwich Village home of Jonathan Adler and Simon Doonan.

While design people clamor for vintage models (at auction they go for around $3,000), new ones are still produced—with some material updates—by Italian maker Longhi. The appeal is wide-ranging. Designer Hollie Bowden, who snapped up a worn-in Elda in Morocco for a project in Ibiza, calls it “super comfy and quite bosslike.” Meanwhile, designer Jonathan Adler, who lives with one in his Manhattan home, calls the seat “a strange mix of plastic futurism and organic brainlike channel upholstery in a commanding scale.” Or, as he has deemed it, “executive squish.” longhi.it