Caribe Natural Dining Chair
Width: 553 mm
Height: 750 mm
Depth: 560 mm
Seat Height: 450 mm
Material
Wicker from Bejuco roots. Galvanized and powder coated tubular steel frame
The Caribe Natural Dining Chair is a design by Sebastian Herkner, featuring a beautiful wicker webbing. The shape of the chair follows our popular Caribe and Caribe Chic pieces, while the beige hue of the natural material gives it a more subtle touch. In Colombia, there’s a long tradition of using the wicker to craft baskets for the arrieros, the coffee pickers, who use them to collect the beans on the plantations in the country’s hinterlands. “For Caribe, we’ve now chosen a natural wicker that has a long tradition in Colombian craftsmanship to create a chair that’s clearly made for indoor spaces”, says Sebastian Herkner. “The wicker lends the design a natural look and makes it very comfortable to sit in.”
The craftspeople in the ames ateliers use an especially intricate weaving technique for the Caribe Natural pieces. The result is a particularly dense structure that covers the seat and back. The wicker is made from the branches of the Bejuco, a vine-like plant that grows in the coffee regions of Colombia, and it is traditionally used to make baskets for collecting coffee beans. The plant’s liana-like branches are dried in the sun and prepped for ten days to separate the bark from the inner fibres. Latter are then woven by hand around the steel frame in a process that takes five days. Just the preparation of all the materials takes eight days, while the production of each chair takes six days
German designer Sebastian Herkner is a long-term collaborator of ames and has visited Colombia multiple times to experience the country’s cities, nature and people first hand. He also visited many of the ateliers that ames has partnered with to learn about the unique traditional crafts of Colombia's regions. A sought-after contemporary designer and recipient of many industry awards, he has worked with many international design brands, creating intriguing pieces that showcase his intuition for interesting material, colour and texture combinations
