Children's chairs, from Wishbone to Mini Togo, and a Hamburg exhibition

A child's chair is often an adult's idea of how a child should behave. That's the thread of Architectural Digest's essay on tiny chairs, which runs from Carl Hansen & Søn's 2024 Children's Wishbone, made with the same 100-step process as the 1949 original, to Ligne Roset's Mini Togo and Paola Lenti's downsized Kids Collection.

Hamburg's Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe sets these launches in a longer story. Its exhibition "Mini Furniture: Chairs for Children" gathers more than 130 chairs from two centuries, including high chairs, miniature classics and pieces meant to support a child's motor, social and creative development. Look out for a 1931 English Correction Chair, built to straighten posture, and Erich Dieckmann's 1925 ladder chair, which doubles as steps for reaching high shelves.

Elsewhere the piece takes in the Eames Elephant, Henry Julier's stool-like chair for USM, and Lora Appleton of the children's design gallery Kinder Modern, who warns that a shrunken icon is often "just cute, but not functional". Her son tends to crawl underneath instead.

The article closes with a shopping list, but the history is the good part. If you're in Hamburg before the show closes on 1 November, it's an easy detour for anyone who has watched a child turn a chair into a fort.

Our summary of a story from Architectural Digest, published 22 October 2026. Read the original

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