Kata Chair × Arper

For Arper's first solid wood chair, we wanted to celebrate the essence of wood in its most direct form. Designed for dining and meeting spaces, Kata conveys warmth, naturalness, and understated elegance — creating environments that feel both inviting and considered.

Kata completes Arper's Wood Collection, designed for warmer, more tactile work and living environments- it pairs naturally with the Ghia table while bringing the same character to more technical settings: restaurants, meeting rooms, collaborative workspaces.

Adapting Kata lounge to a chair format required some rethinking.
Part of Kata's original initiative was to use modern technology in a way that reflects a traditional heritage in a contemporary, warm way, while also reducing the ecological footprint via lightness and reduction of material.

The Kata chair continues this via the creation of a minimally thin plywood that is visually and structurally enhanced through the application of a texture we designed specifically for this project - a reinterpretation of a technique that has been used by classic Thonet bentwood chair seats in the early days of the last century.

Warmth does not mean the same thing in every context or climate.
A loose seat cushion can make a wood chair generous enough for a home dining table; a contract restaurant or a meeting room asks for something more integrated. The two versions — wood shell and upholstered — address these different needs without branching into two separate objects.

The upholstered version of the Kata chair responds to this range, offering a wide palette of fabrics— including options for customer's own material — with decorative stitching available in contrasting or tone-on-tone finishes. The result is a chair that can read as understated or expressive depending on the fabric choice, adapting to the register of the space around it.

Between soft and graphic, Kata speaks to multiple associations at once: the popular typology of the classic bistro or café chair, the discipline of the industrial workplace, the warmth of a domestic interior. It is a chair that does not insist on any single reading, which is perhaps why it moves so easily between contexts.

The collection is FSC-certified across its wood components, designed for disassembly, and built with the end of its first life already in mind — so that its materials can find a second one. Sustainability here is not a finish applied to the surface of the project; it is part of the same logic that shaped every other decision.