Pair of French Leather Club Chairs • c. 1940s

Dimensions · 36"W × 34"D × 31"H each

Material · Basane — full-grain French sheepskin, vegetable tanned

Form · Round back, scrolled arms, squared block feet

Detail · Hand-set dome nailheads down both rear edges, following the curve of each shoulder

Era · c. 1940s. The construction — hand-set nailheads, block feet, full-grain hide — is consistent with the period.

Origin · France. Acquired from a private collection of mid-century furniture.

Condition · Great condition, see detailed videos for a closer look at all angles. Original leather throughout, never recolored. Deep honeyed patina with real tonal variation across the seats, arms and backs. Light surface markings & light fraying on the bottom trim consistent with age and use. Both chairs sound and sitting level. Sold as a pair.

Low, wide, and made to be dropped into rather than sat on. The arms roll forward in one continuous curve, the back rises to a single broad crown barely higher than they are, and the whole chair rides close to the floor — the proportion that separates a French club chair from everything that later borrowed from it. The leather has darkened to a rich cognac over time. 

Turn one around and the record is on the back. Two runs of dome-head nails follow the curve of each shoulder down to the feet, set one at a time and spaced by eye — the first thing a specialist looks for, because even spacing by hand is the part that cannot be done at speed. The hide is basane, the full-grain French sheepskin these chairs were always built from: vegetable tanned, six to eight skins to a single chair, heavy enough to hold its own shape over the frame.

They came from a collector of mid-century furniture who purchased then from their original owner. We were not planning to sell them. They kept appearing in the background of photographs taken for other pieces, people kept writing to ask about the chairs instead, and at some point that stops being a coincidence. A matched pair worn the same way over the same decades a rare find. Singles surface constantly. Pairs do not.

A small paper label survives on the underside, a photograph of a turreted house above the words Arden House. We have not been able to establish which house. It is the kind of thing that comes with objects that have been somewhere before, and we have photographed it in case someone knows it.

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