Welcome to Style Detective, a series from T Magazine. Each month, we’ll investigate readers’ questions regarding the items and objects they can’t stop thinking about — and can’t track down. Subscribe here and click this link to submit your own questions.
“I recently stayed at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York (because I learned about it from your magazine) and loved it. In the lobby and bar, they have these diminutive, upholstered chairs with fringe along the bottom. I want a pair for my home, but I can’t find anything like them, especially at that scale.” — Linda, Santa Fe, N.M.
I can see why you like these little chairs. Decorators use special pieces like them to convey a certain mood or, in this case, encourage a guest to sit down for a drink. Low upholstered chairs without arms are called slipper chairs, and they’re often relatively small. They were originally made to help 18th-century women get their shoes on and off. The French version of the chair, the chauffeuse — also low and armless — is more commonly associated with warming oneself by a fireplace. In the 1950s and ’60s, the American decorator Billy Baldwin was largely responsible for bringing the slipper chair out of the bedroom. His modern versions were bigger and boxier, and included a subtle recess in the backrest for the seat cushion. They became popular for their versatility; they fit where more cumbersome armchairs didn’t. I bought a pair 30 years ago at Sotheby’s. Now on their fourth slipcovers, they’re still useful at parties because, when sitting in them, you can easily turn in any direction to chat with guests.
To find out more about the Fifth Avenue Hotel’s chairs, I reached out to the property’s designer, Martin Brudnizki, a New York- and London-based Swedish interior architect known for his opulent, colorful interiors. Thankfully, he was willing to share information about them (some designers prefer to keep their sources a secret). “I imagined the hotel as the home of an eclectic collector,” Brudnizki, 59, told me. “Every piece needed to feel as though it had its own story,”
The chairs were specially made for the hotel’s opening in 2023. Instead of leaning into Baldwin’s streamlined form, Brudnizki wanted his to look like Victorian heirlooms that might have furnished the property in 1907, when it was built to be a mansion. Using the Gresham chair Brudnizki designed for the traditional English furniture maker George Smith as his jumping-off point — that chair was produced through his company, And Objects, a partnership with the creative director Nicholas Jeanes — he then raised the back, upholstered it in a rose-colored Brunschwig & Fils mohair velvet and added a skirt fringe with hand-tied tassels from Samuel & Sons, a family-owned New York company specializing in passementerie, or decorative textile trimmings.
If you want something similar in quality to Brudnizki’s designs, it could cost over $6,000 a chair (about $5,000 for the chair itself, $1,100 for the mohair velvet and $500 for the fringe). Or you could hunt for an antique like this or this — or for a piece that’s new, like this one from the Inside. And if there’s an upholstery workshop near you, you could always have one made with more budget-friendly materials. Given the simple form of a slipper chair, most workshops should be able to make an approximation of the Fifth Avenue Hotel’s. Then you could choose fabrics and trim to make it your own.
