The Tolix Chair

This guest post by Mark A Brew is the first in our Requested Posts series.

The Tolix chair was built to endure welders, storms, and salt air. Today, it endures brunch. It was designed for labour, but now it props up lifestyle. And in that way, it mirrors the world it inhabits: where spaces perform productivity, and steel is just another aesthetic.

This is the story of the Tolix Marais A chair: a chunk of galvanized steel born in a French factory, now quietly embedded in the global grammar of taste.

It starts with Xavier Pauchard, a zinc roofer in Burgundy who, in 1907, discovered that dipping steel in molten zinc stopped it from rusting. This gave birth to a flood of durable goods—buckets, tubs, tools—and eventually, one of the most quietly influential pieces of furniture in design history.

In 1934, Tolix launched the Model A: all-steel, weatherproof, stackable. By 1956, it had evolved into the definitive Tolix A—a post-industrial design that could stack 25 high and outlast a war. The chair spread through France like an appliance. You found it in cafés, hospitals, ferries, factories. Not boutiques—buildings that sweat. It wasn’t just furniture. It was part of the job.

Then the 1990s happened. Metal was out. Softness was in. Tolix went bankrupt.

Enter Chantal Andriot, the company’s former accountant, who bought the brand in 2004 and revived it by not fixing what wasn’t broken.

She kept production local, commissioned tasteful variants, upgraded machinery—just enough to call it “artisanal.” A chair that once did work now just looked like it might. And in a world that confuses aesthetics with ethics, that was more than enough.

What followed wasn’t a comeback. It was a migration. Tolix didn’t return to the workplace. It moved into concept cafés and high-rent Airbnbs. Not because it was ergonomic. Because it looked like it remembered a time when things were.

The Tolix A didn’t succeed because it was comfortable. It succeeded because it looked serious. Like it had done its part. Like it had survived something—maybe a ferry terminal, maybe an honest day's labour. It was steel as signifier. The flannel shirt of chairs.

And so it settled in, quietly, into the curated corners of modern life. In a Helsinki barbershop, someone gets a €48 beard trim while seated on galvanized steel. In a Brooklyn wine bar, guests sip “natural reds” while perched on repurposed postwar austerity. There’s a rooftop brunch in Lisbon where the sun ricochets off 40 brushed-metal backs, blinding three influencers mid-selfie. In a coworking loft in Singapore, 200 Tolix chairs sit beneath a neon sign that says: “Do what you love.” The chairs oblige, silently.

The Tolix doesn’t just furnish these places. It completes the illusion. It cosplays utility. A chair built for sweat now signals “focus” in rooms where no one’s allowed to talk above a whisper.

It is not democratic like the Monobloc. It doesn’t follow you to the beach or into a village hall. It’s what a hedge fund manager imagines a welder might have sat on. Steel cosplay with a French accent.

And yet: it performs. It lets the room say, “we take things seriously here,” without committing to anything that might involve noise, dust, or heat. Like Helvetica. Like reclaimed wood. Like standing desks in offices where everyone’s sitting down.

Eventually, it forgot it was French. Now it’s just... present. In Buenos Aires. In Shoreditch. In Anna Wintour’s office.

Vice, perhaps speaking for all of us, once ran a piece titled: “Dear Restaurants: This Chair Sucks.” Fair. But also, how many objects reach global saturation with no logo, no campaign, and no consistent manufacturer? The Tolix chair pulled it off by being the perfect mute accessory: industrial, photogenic, narratively vacant.

The Tolix isn’t just everywhere—it’s doing a job. Not the one it was built for, but one that pays better: it signals effort in spaces designed to avoid it. It gives restaurants, offices, and curated homes the look of industriousness without the inconvenience.

You don’t choose it because it’s comfortable. You choose it because it says, “work in progress.” It’s visual shorthand for grit, purpose, and a touch of European steel, delivered flat-packed and vibe-checked.

That’s why it endures. The Tolix chair doesn’t work anymore. It just looks like it did. Which, for most people, is close enough.