The 'Bikini Chair’: bringing sex appeal to the table

The Bikini Chair

In 1955 Garth Chester, an experimental and self-taught furniture designer, launched a new design - a three-legged chair which he named the Bikini Chair. As the name suggests, Chester took inspiration from the latest rage in swimwear, which although launched almost a decade earlier, still remained the preserve of only the most daring of young women in the early 1950s.

Chester first came to prominence as a furniture designer in the 1940s with his Curvesse chair, a sinuous cantilevered plywood chair that seemed to defy gravity - an achievement which was a world first. Having influenced generations of designers, the Curvesse has become a New Zealand design icon. The Bikini Chair, which was Chester’s most commercially successful product and came in a range of variations, is considered to be Chester’s second most iconic design.

The 39 year-old Chester, perhaps with a little twinkle in his eye, designed the chair so that the plywood seat evoked a bikini brief and the back-rest a strapless bra. The chair could be purchased with a three-legged Bikini Table or a standard rectangular table, and also as a bar stool. While whimsical to today’s eyes, there was at least one Auckland housewife who found the Bikini Chair just a little too sexy for her household. On seeing the table and chairs that her husband purchased for their dinette, she firmly rejected them as ‘filthy minded’. Their return was prompt. (1)

While the Bikini Chair may not have been to every homemaker’s taste, the light weight and easily portable chair proved popular among a number of Auckland’s more progressive businesses, including the Ca d’Oro coffee bar and the Sareta Beauty Salon. The black Bikini Chair and manicure table in Te Papa’s collection, which features a sloping arm rest for a pair of elegant hands and inbuilt lamp, was made especially for Sareta’s. In keeping with Chester’s habit of writing in pencil on the base of his works, the table bears the inscription ‘Manicure Table / Designed for Sareta Salons / By Garth Chester Ltd / 32 France Street / Auckland’.(2) Chester had both a workshop and shop in France Street.

In the beauty salon

Founded by Mrs Eleanor K Wright, Sareta Beauty Salons opened for business in Auckland’s Smith and Caughey Building on Thursday 27 June 1929. Declaring Sareta’s to be the most ‘luxurious and most up-to-date’ beauty salon in The Dominion, Mrs Wright offered ‘a complete Beauty service’, including hairdressing, facial massage, manicuring and chiropody. There was even a themed nursery for the little ones.(3) In July 1942 Monte Winter took over Sareta’s. Fondly remembered by staff and pupils as ‘a gentleman’, Winter was to become synonymous with hairdressing in Auckland for decades to come.(4) Photographs taken of Monte Winter’s beauty salon in 1956 reveal a modern interior with a chequerboard floor. While Chester’s Bikini chair and manicure table are not to be seen, it is an interior into which they would have effortlessly slipped.(5) Chester was no stranger to working for beauty salons. In 1953 he designed the furniture for another of Auckland’s leading beauty salons, Kays Beauty Salon. Chester’s plywood collection for Kays included three child-sized barbers’ chairs, one of which is now in the collection of the Auckland War Memorial Museum.

In the coffee bar

The Ca d’Oro coffee bar was located just a short walk from the Sareta Beauty Salon on Customs Street West. The coffee bar was established in 1957 by businessman-cum-actor Harold Kissin, (perhaps best known to New Zealanders for roles in Close to Home and Mortimer’s Patch), and his friend Memé Churton. The daughter of a Chinese father and Italian mother, Memé Ching arrived in New Zealand for a three month holiday in 1950, and ended up marrying Jock Churton, a New Zealand intelligence officer whom she had met in Trieste in 1945. Like many post-war European immigrants, Memé - who thought nothing of wearing Dior while she cooked - found New Zealand ‘raw, uncultured’. New Zealander’s swore like troopers, drank too much and dressed like peasants - or even worse like the Queen Mother. The food was shocking. The coffee undrinkable.(7)

Blessed with an entrepreneurial spirit, a vivacious personality and flair for cooking Memé set out to improve the coffee and food stakes in Auckland at least, with a dash of Continental sophistication. Churton and Kissin transformed his family’s failing jewellery store into ‘a new gay colourful Espresso bar with all the atmosphere of Venice’(8) with the aid of Dutch designer Peter Smeele, who in turn commissioned fellow Dutch émigré Frank Carpay to design a rod steel mural of a gondola for the cafe. Carpay’s flowing black lines worked perfectly with Chester’s flirtatious Bikini Chairs, which perhaps stood in for the bikini clad beauties of Lido Beach. Memé completed the fit-out with an imported espresso machine that cost 500 guineas, the price she recalls of an Austin car.(9)

Ca d’Oro or ‘house of gold’, soon became a lively meeting place for ‘the eccentrics, the misfits and the intellectuals of Auckland’, and as the decade rolled over for ‘dazzling drag queens aglow with the glitter and glitz of the 60s.' (10) Perched on one of Chester’s Bikini Chairs, patrons could dine on artisanal meats, breads, pastries and other delicacies sourced from a variety of European immigrants, and enjoy a convivial and lively atmosphere from 9am to midnight. When Memé established her second coffee bar, Trieste, she once again chose to furnish it with Chester’s ‘striking’ Bikini Chairs.(11) Chester may not have been European, but his progressive designs imbued interiors with a modern and up-beat vibe.

Following the success of the Bikini Chair, Chester continued to steadily produce new furniture designs, including lighting and heating.(12) By the mid-1960s, however, Chester began to suffer from ill health. He sadly passed away in 1968 from emphysema, the result perhaps of routine exposure to paint, glue and lacquer fumes. He was only 52.

By Claire Regnault, Senior Curator - Creative Industries, Te Papa

First published in Glory Days, 2013: 3.

Endnotes

1. D. Lloyd-Jenkins, Home: A Century of New Zealand Design, (Godwit, 2004), 144.

2. Earlier works by Garth Chester often feature an adhesive label reading ‘Riginals’, the name under which he operated until a fire destroyed his factory in 1954. Works following the fire tend to feature hand-written pencil notes.

3. ‘A New Conception of Beauty Service’ (advertisement), Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 146, 22 June 1929, p15.

4. Monte Winter opened his first Beauty Salon in 1931. In 1963 he added Winters Hairdressing School to his hairdressing empire. The school still operates today.

5. The Auckland War Memorial Museum holds a series of photographs of Monte Winter’s beauty salon by Bill Sparrow of Sparrow Industrial Pictures.

6. Ibid, 136.

7. ibid,133-137.

8. Ca d’Oro’s opening advertisement, The Auckland Star, Thursday 11 July, 1957, 8.

9. Churton, 177

10. ibid, 178. N. Te Awekotuku, ‘On Grafton and being careful’, Metro, January 1989, V 9, No. 91, p. 72

11. ibid, 183

12. Lloyd-Jenkins, 144.