How a chair designed for a government office became one of the most admired design objects of the 20th century is a story worth knowing. It involves a new nation, an ambitious city, a group of architects whose names are only now being fully told, and a design so well resolved that seventy years have done nothing to diminish it.
A new city for a new India
In 1947, India became independent. Partition divided the subcontinent, and Punjab lost its capital, Lahore, to what became Pakistan. A new capital was needed.
Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru chose to build it from scratch. Chandigarh, on a plain at the foot of the Shivalik Hills in northern India, was to be a model city. Modern, planned, and forward-looking. Nehru described it as "a new city, unfettered by the traditions of the past, a symbol of India's freedom."
In 1950, Le Corbusier, the Swiss-French architect, was appointed to lead the urban plan. He brought his cousin and long-time collaborator Pierre Jeanneret with him.
The arrangement was, in practice, a division of labour. Le Corbusier worked on the monumental civic buildings and the master plan. He spent periods in Chandigarh but was not based there permanently. Pierre Jeanneret stayed. For more than fifteen years, he lived in Chandigarh as its chief resident architect. He oversaw the day-to-day construction. He designed the schools, the university buildings, the housing, the everyday structures of the new city. And he was responsible for furnishing all of it.
This distinction matters. Le Corbusier's name dominates the popular account of Chandigarh. But the furniture, and much of what makes the city liveable, was Jeanneret's work. And not only his.
The people who made the chairs
The Chandigarh chair was not designed by one person at a drawing board.
It was the product of a collaborative team of architects, draftspeople, and craftspeople working together in the workshops of the new city. This group is sometimes called the Chandigarh Collective. Their work was practical and iterative. Furniture for specific buildings, specific uses, specific climates. Tens of thousands of pieces.
One name that has been largely missing from the popular account of the design is Eulie Chowdhury.
Urmila Eulie Chowdhury was born in 1923 in Uttar Pradesh. Her father was a diplomat, and she grew up travelling the world. She studied architecture in Sydney, ceramics in New Jersey, and spoke fluent French. She joined the Chandigarh project in 1951, at the age of 28. She was the only Indian woman on the team.
Her French gave her an immediate and important role. She became the bridge between Le Corbusier and Jeanneret, who spoke little English, and the Indian architects and administrators on the project. She managed correspondence between Corbusier and Prime Minister Nehru after Corbusier returned to France.
But her contribution went further than communication. She worked closely with Pierre Jeanneret on the design of furniture for the city's government offices and institutions. The V&A, which holds Chandigarh chairs in its permanent collection, wrote of Chowdhury: "its fascinating origin story is often untold, and its designer, Eulie Chowdhury, usually remains uncredited."
One of her specific contributions was to the proportions. Le Corbusier's modular system, which underpinned much of the planning and detailing of Chandigarh, was based on the measurements of an average French man. Chowdhury carefully reconsidered and adapted those proportions to create furniture better suited to Indian statures. The chairs we know today carry that adjustment in their dimensions.
Chowdhury went on to become Chief Architect of Chandigarh and later Chief Architect of the state of Punjab. She was the first Indian woman elected to the Royal Institute of British Architects. She died in Chandigarh in 1995, in the city she had spent most of her adult life building.
Her name deserves to be part of how we tell the story of these chairs.
Two traditions, one design
The Chandigarh furniture was not purely Indian in its origins, nor purely European. It emerged from a deliberate collision between the two.
Pierre Jeanneret arrived in India shaped by the ideas of European Modernism: clean geometry, structural honesty, the elimination of unnecessary ornament. The design language he had developed with Le Corbusier in France is visible in the Chandigarh chairs. The V-leg, the precise angles, the economy of form.
But those ideas were worked out using Indian materials, Indian craft knowledge, and Indian hands. The carpentry workshops surrounding Chandigarh were staffed by craftspeople with generations of skill in working teak and weaving cane. The drawings from the Design Office were given to these workshops with an explicit freedom to improvise on details and proportions to suit their tools and methods.
The result was a design language that belongs to both traditions and to neither exclusively. European Modernism gave it its structural logic. Indian craft gave it its warmth, its variation, and its life.
An open design, by intention
No two Chandigarh chairs were ever exactly alike.
The Design Office produced drawings. Those drawings went out to several independent carpentry workshops, with instructions that workshops could adapt details and proportions as needed. Craftspeople improvised. Different workshops made different interpretations. Over time, the same style of furniture spread beyond Chandigarh itself, appearing in government offices and private homes in Delhi, Bangalore, and other Indian cities.
The designs were never registered for copyright. They were never licensed to a single manufacturer. They carried no trademark. This was not an oversight. It reflected how the furniture was conceived: as practical objects for public life, made to be produced and used widely.
Historians and archivists who have studied the Pierre Jeanneret archive at the Canadian Centre for Architecture describe the Chandigarh furniture programme as perhaps the first open source design project of such scale anywhere in the world.
The Design Office created the foundations. The workshops built on them freely. The designs spread organically. No one owned them. They were made for a community, by a community. That spirit has carried through to today, where quality re-editions are made by craftspeople around the world, continuing a tradition of production that was always intended to be shared.
Why teak and rattan
The material choices were not aesthetic decisions. They were practical ones.
Teak was locally available in India, workable by the craftspeople in Chandigarh's workshops, and naturally resistant to the city's heat and humidity. It is one of the hardest and most dimensionally stable of tropical hardwoods, resistant to moisture and insects without chemical treatment. It was the right material for the job.
Rattan, a climbing palm native to South and Southeast Asian forests, was similarly available and appropriate. Split cane was a traditional craft material in the region. It is flexible, strong in tension, and breathable. In a hot climate, an open woven seat allows air circulation in a way that a solid or upholstered surface does not. The hand-weaving was done by craftspeople already skilled in the technique.
The V-shaped legs were not a stylistic flourish either. The V-leg is structurally efficient, distributing the load of the seat across a wider base than a straight leg, and bracing the frame laterally without requiring additional cross-members. The result is a chair that is strong without being heavy.
Every design decision had a functional rationale. The beauty came as a consequence, not as an intention. This is, arguably, why the design has lasted.
Discarded, then rediscovered
For the first few decades of the city's life, the furniture was simply used. It was government furniture. Practical and unremarkable to the people who sat in it every day.
By the 1980s, Chandigarh's institutions began modernising. The original furniture was decommissioned. Many pieces ended up in storage, on rooftops, or sold at local auctions for a few rupees. Some found their way into tea houses and private homes. A chair designed for a government office became everyday furniture, used without any awareness of its significance.
In the early 2000s, a small group of European furniture dealers began making trips to Chandigarh. They recognised the design quality of what others had overlooked. They acquired significant quantities of the original pieces, restored them, and brought them to design fairs in Paris and New York.
The response was immediate. Collectors, architects, and interior designers around the world took notice. The chairs began appearing at major auction houses. Prices climbed sharply.
In 2011, India introduced restrictions on the export of antique furniture, effectively ending the legal flow of original Chandigarh pieces to international collectors. The supply stopped. Values for authenticated pre-2011 pieces have continued to rise. The chairs now appear at Christie's, Phillips, and Sotheby's. Sets of six original 1950s chairs have reached $72,000 and beyond at auction.
A chair that was sold as scrap in the 1980s became part of the global design canon.
The fuller story
The rediscovery of Chandigarh's furniture has also prompted a more honest account of who made it.
For most of its recent history in Western design circles, the chair has been attributed solely to Pierre Jeanneret. Auction houses have called it simply "the Jeanneret chair." The contribution of Indian architects, draftspeople, and craftspeople, and the specific contribution of Eulie Chowdhury, has been largely absent from that account.
This is beginning to change. The V&A's 2023 Tropical Modernism exhibition included Chandigarh furniture and explicitly acknowledged Chowdhury's role. The Wikipedia entry for the Chandigarh chair now credits her as a co-designer. Dezeen, writing in 2024, noted that the chair's renewed prominence has "shone a light on the erasure of local designers in the mid-century modern design narrative."
The chairs we make at Object Embassy are inspired by the designs of Pierre Jeanneret and the Chandigarh Collective. We think the full story of who made them, including the names that have been missing from the account, is worth telling.
Why the design endures
Not many objects designed for a specific building, in a specific city, in the 1950s, are still in production and in high demand seventy years later.
The Chandigarh chair is. And the reasons are not hard to identify.
The proportions are genuinely resolved. The back angle, seat depth, and leg geometry work together in a way that functions well and looks right. There is no surface decoration that might date it. No finish that changes with fashion. The teak deepens over time. The rattan develops character with use. The design ages honestly rather than deteriorating.
It also has the rare quality of sitting comfortably in a very wide range of interiors. In a minimalist apartment, a Mediterranean kitchen, a mid-century living room, or a contemporary hotel restaurant, the chair holds its own without competing with its surroundings. This visual adaptability is not accidental. It is the product of a design language that is precise without being assertive.
And then there is the history. An object that carries a genuine story, made for a real place with a specific purpose, by people whose names we are only now fully learning, has a kind of depth that self-consciously designed objects rarely achieve. The Chandigarh chair is not trying to be significant. It simply is.
Chandigarh itself was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2016. The Capitol Complex, designed by Le Corbusier and built under Jeanneret's supervision, is among the finest examples of 20th-century modernist architecture in the world. The furniture that furnished it is, increasingly, recognised as part of the same legacy.
Living with this design today
The original 1950s pieces are rare and largely beyond reach for most buyers. For those who want to bring this design into their homes, quality re-editions made from the original materials are the way.
At Object Embassy, our Chandigarh design chairs are made from A-grade teak and hand-woven natural rattan, following the original dimensions and construction methods. Each chair passes a 74-point quality inspection before it leaves our workshop.
The design is available in the full range of models from the Chandigarh collection: the office chair, the lounge chair, the armless dining chair, and others. Each was designed for a specific building and use in Chandigarh. Each has its own story.
Explore the Object Embassy Chandigarh collection. Each chair is produced using the highest-quality A-grade teak and hand-woven natural rattan. Our re-editions are developed from the original 1950s design drawings, with proportions carefully adapted to modern standards.
The Object Embassy Chandigarh collection
