Armchair for the Dining Room of the Wagner Apartment, Köstlergasse 3, 1898/99

Otto Wagner’s (1841–1918) apartment in Vienna’s Mariahilf district was situated on the raised ground floor of a tenement building bordering the two much more spectacular apartment and commercial buildings on the Linke Wienzeile. Wagner acted both as these buildings’ planning architect and owner. The wood- and marble-paneled bathroom with a glass bath tub, which was the apartment’s main attraction, conformed to the highest hygiene standards of the time. While Wagner preferred floral textiles for the bedroom, the other rooms were decorated with a wallpaper featuring a white and purple striped pattern. In the dining room, this made for a particularly stringent effect, as the wall hangings were striped as well and the stucco work on the ceiling consisted of vertical fluting. Wagner revisited the stripe motif in the vertical spokes of the backrests of the dining room chairs. Another characteristic of this part of the furniture were circular mother-of-pearl inlays, which look like screw heads but are merely decorations. A chair of this type, upholstered with leather, was shown in 1900 at the 13th Exhibition of the Vienna Secession.

IR, 2021