Vitra Furniture

Vitra produces some of the most influential furniture in modern design – the Eames Lounge Chair, the DSW, the Aluminium Group, the Panton Chair. Each piece is manufactured at Vitra's Weil am Rhein facility under licence from the original designers' estates. The collection at Heal's covers Vitra's full furniture range plus current Vitra sale promotions.
  • Grand Repos Chair Grand Repos Chair Premium Leather Ochre 62 / Polished Aluminium
    +5
    11 Fabric options
  • Eames Wire Chair DKW Eames Wire Chair DKW DKW Golden Maple
    3 Base Finish options
  • Eames EA219 Soft Pad Office Swivel Chair Premium Leather Nero 66 Eames EA219 Soft Pad Office Swivel Chair Premium Leather Nero 66
    2 Fabric options
  • Wooden Side Table Small Walnut Wooden Side Table Small Dark Oak
    3 Colour options
  • Grand Relax Chair Grand Relax Chair Polished Aluminium / Premium Leather Cognac 97
    3 Base Finish options
  • Eames EA208 Soft Pad Chair Leather Premium Jade Deep Black Base New Height Eames EA208 Soft Pad Chair Leather Premium Jade Deep Black Base New Height
  • Eames EDU Desk Eames EDU Desk
  • Home Desk Home Desk
  • Eames Plastic Armchair RE LAR Eames Plastic Armchair RE LAR Citron / LAR Chrome
    +10
    16 Base Finish options
  • Flower Coffee Table Flower Coffee Table Small

    Vitra holds the European licence rights for Charles and Ray Eames, George Nelson, Jean Prouvé, Verner Panton and several other 20th-century masters. Pieces produced by Vitra are the only authorised European editions, with construction matching the original designers' specifications. Replicas are unlicensed copies that often differ in proportions, materials and construction quality.

    The Eames DSW (dining chair), Eames Lounge Chair and Panton Chair are consistently the top three. The Standard Chair (Jean Prouvé) and the Aluminium Group office chairs also feature regularly. Each of these has been in continuous production for decades and remains a reference point in its category.

    Yes. Discontinued or limited-edition Vitra pieces appreciate steadily; current production pieces hold value better than most contemporary furniture. The brand has a strong vintage market, and pieces from the 1980s and 90s often command higher prices than the original purchase. Buy because you want to live with the piece; the investment performance follows.

    Stocked colours and configurations typically deliver in 4-8 weeks. Made-to-order options (specific Eames Lounge Chair leather and timber combinations, custom Aluminium Group fabrics) take 12-16 weeks. The order team confirms timing at point of order; Heal's has direct supply relationships with Vitra that often shorten lead times vs other retailers.

    • Five Vitra Furniture Classics
      BrandsProducts
      Five Vitra Furniture Classics
      Vitra is a Swiss furniture brand established by Willi and Erika Fehlbaum in 1957, with the licensed production of furniture from renowned brands such as Charles & Ray Eames, Alexander Girard, George Nelson and Isamu Noguchi. Known for its commitment to forming lasting relationships with talented designers, the company is famed for enhancing living, office and public spaces. Bringing together the best in iconic, contemporary design, Vitra's modernist products and concepts are installed worldwide by architects and companies to create inspirational living spaces. Luckily for us, we can celebrate and incorporate its designs into our homes. Here are five classic Vitra furniture pieces you can add to any home: Eames Lounge Chair The Eames lounge chair was designed by husband and wife duo, Charles and Ray Eames and has been in production for over 60 years. It’s one of the - if not the - most iconic designs of the 20th century. Since 1956, when both design and designer debuted on national television, this classic chair has remained true to the handcrafted details that define its luxurious design. Today, the Eames lounge chair is a staple in any contemporary furniture collection. Made from soft leather and sturdy plywood, it’s still regarded as the most comfortable seat of its time. The Eames Lounge Chair Eames Plastic Chair The Eames plastic chair range is another iconic collection by Charles and Ray Eames. Introduced to the market in 1950 with the launch of the plastic armchair and plastic side chair, these designs were the very first mass-produced plastic chairs in the history of furniture. The chairs epitomise the playful functionality of mid-century American design, created to fit the contours of the human body. The plastic chairs fully exploit the advantage of the material they’re crafted in: rigid, durable and easy to mould. Only one feature from its original design has been changed, with the replacement of the fibreglass shell to a more environmentally friendly polyproline seat. The Eames Plastic Chairs The Eames plastic chair also introduced a new furniture typology: the multifunctional chair whose shell can be joined with different bases to serve diverse purposes. Today the seat is manufactured in multiple variations, so whether you’re looking for a curvaceous chair that provides back support, a rocking armchair or an office chair on wheels - Vitra has the plastic piece for you. There are a multitude of bases, colours and upholstery options, which will work in everything from dining rooms, living rooms and home offices to outdoor terraces and gardens. Vitra Utensil Silo In 1969, Dorothee Becker designed and brought to market the first wall-mounted organiser, followed by a smaller model a year later. The Vitra utensil silo has since been deemed an icon of plastic design and has become a staple in design-savvy homes, particularly in Europe and the US. The Utensil Silo by Vitra This wall-mounted organiser keeps your household utensils neatly together in one place - making it easier to find everyday objects. It features different-sized and shaped containers, metal hooks and clips, and it offers a practical storage space for all your odds and ends. The utensil silo is very versatile, allowing it to be easily added to different rooms in the house including the kitchen, office, bathroom and children’s rooms. Offered in black, red and white, this holder is a stylish way to get your bits and bobs organised. Vitra Noguchi Coffee Table Designed in 1944 by Isamu Noguchi, this mid-century design is renowned for its free-form, unpredictable and flowing appearance. “Everything is sculpture,” said the Japanese-American sculptor – renowned for his ability to make sculptures out of anything that was available to him including clay, wood, stone, metal, paper and bone. The Noguchi Coffee Table by Vitra The organic formed Noguchi coffee table boasts a solid wooden base that consists of two identical pieces. These create symmetry and stability, while supporting an elegantly-shaped glass top. Offered in a choice of black ash or walnut,it's the perfect centrepiece for a mid-century modern style living area. The Vitra Home Desk The iconic home desk was originally designed as a women’s working table by George Nelson in 1958. It’s manufactured today by Vitra, bringing the colourful, curvy station to a new audience. More than 50 years since it was first produced, the sophisticated home piece still has many uses as a small workstation in any modern home. This Vitra desk is detailed with attractive divider finishes and features swooping lines and chrome feet that support classic walnut panelling. Its vibrant rainbow-coloured compartments are sure to bring your home office to life. This sought-after compact piece adds an inspired accent, perfectly suited to any contemporary, mid-century style workspace. The Vitra Home Desk Although these quintessential designs were established over 60 years ago, their popularity and reputation are sustained by the power of good design. From the understated Eames lounge chair and Ottoman to the exciting Vitra clocks, Vitra consistently produces timeless designs. Explore our collection of furniture and incorporate Vitra’s classic and contemporary lighting and accessories into your home. Come in store at Tottenham Court Road to visit our Vitra showroom, the largest in the UK.
    • The Trending Iconic Furniture Pieces To Invest In
      Latest Trends
      The Trending Iconic Furniture Pieces To Invest In
      The Iconic Investments Index Interior design trends may come and go, but some timeless pieces are more than a phase. Your home should be a treasure trove of pieces that bring in joy and make your space yours - but what if some of your furniture was considered actual treasure? From vintage classics to up and coming designs, we’ve tracked the data behind the trends to find which furniture to invest in now that will pay off later. As well as affordable classics, we have also looked into the glamorous world of big-ticket antiques and the latest furniture phases that will garner a return on your purchase. Vintage or well-made furniture is not only a fashion statement but a statement for sustainability. We have looked at the carbon footprint of ‘fast’ furniture and how preloved items can help the planet. Did you know that the carbon emissions from the manufacture of the average sofa are the equivalent of 11,478 smartphones being fully charged? Whether you’re looking for an item to cherish forever, an investment piece to bring you profit or just want to take in some beautifully designed furniture then read on. The Most Iconic Furniture Pieces to Invest In If you’re looking for a stylish investment piece that will bring you joy and maybe a bit of cash when the time comes to sell, we have found the furniture for you. By analysing sales prices and popularity over the last five years, these are the pieces that will be not only a win aesthetically but might also reward you for your investment. The Wishbone Chair from Hans Wegner tops that chart. Originally launched in 1949, this design has truly stood the test of time. With an average resale value of £780.50 and a 200% increase in popularity this beautiful chair is a stylish addition to any home, but sit on this purchase and find bigger profits when the time comes. With ten pieces on the list, the 1960s have the most mentions. From the instantly recognisable Stacking Chair from Verner Panton to the timeless Arco Lamp by Flos, mid-century styles reign supreme. Many of the items on the list wouldn’t look out of place in a modern furniture catalogue, and the appeal of enduring design can be epitomised by these pieces. Endurability is key when it comes to selecting investment pieces. This design quality ensures that furniture catches a buyer’s eye but also grows on you in time. The World's Most Expensive Antiques After taking a look at some more modest investments, we dug through the archives to find the showstopper sales which brought in the biggest amounts. These aren't your average furniture pieces while some aren’t for the faint of heart. Rich in design history, many of these items are accompanied by a story. At first glance, Charles Ray’s ‘Table’ may seem simple but this is a piece of modern art, representing the conundrum of illusion versus reality. The vessels are bottomless and affixed to the tabletop allowing the viewer to see through ordinarily solid items. Critics celebrated the piece when it was released in 1959. It was subsequently sold for over £3 million in 2011. Also featured on our list is the provocative table from Allen Jones, described as an ‘icon of Pop’ and, by way of contrast, a more simple design of a 17th-century folding chair which sold for over £67,000. This shows how some items gain value by becoming infamous, whereas others earn their price tag from skilled craftsmanship that lasts for centuries. The Future Furniture Classics Now we have seen the classics of years gone by, it’s time to look to the future. By tracking global Google search trends and Instagram data, we have calculated the popularity increase and predicted the items from more recent times that are growing in interest. Many of the pieces feature effortless chic design and come in earthy, neutral tones which complement any passing trends. The list features some more quirky designs: The QEEBOO Rabbit Chair brings a touch of modern and classy kitsch to any room, while the Anissa Kermiche Love Handles vase offers a modern callback to nude renaissance sculptures of the past. The Carbon Cost of ‘Fast’ Furniture We’ve all heard the old adage of ‘buy cheap, buy twice’ but budget furniture might not only cost you financially, but it might also cost the environment. While ‘fast fashion’ has come under the spotlight recently, ‘fast’ furniture also has a carbon cost associated with its manufacture. As we marvel at the beautiful designs of the last hundred years carbon emissions might not be the first thing you consider. Investing in vintage pieces, well-made furniture or second-hand effects is a great way to be sustainable. A sofa is normally a big purchase, but it can also come with a big carbon cost, largely down to the foam and stuffing inside it. The longer you use it the more you ‘offset’ its carbon footprint. So it pays to buy items that are better made and have a more timeless design. Similarly, choosing wisely when selecting big-ticket items for your home is essential. By picking something well made that you will love and cherish ensures it’s not heading to the landfill site within a couple of years. Not only is investing in vintage or well-made furniture an investment in your future fortunes, but it is an investment in the future of the planet too. Methodology: To work out the top 27 iconic investments, we used a seed list of furniture originally sold from 1800 to 1990. To this seed list, we analysed sale prices from the last five years, along with the number of Google searches, the most popular country for sales and Google Trend data from 2015 - 2020. Most expensive antiques came from Christie’s most valuable listed sales. While modern classics were judged on: Current RRP Instagram popularity data Google search volume Google Trend data over the past 12 months Using carbon emissions data from the FIRA Carbon Footprint of Furniture report, we assessed the CO2KG of the most popular furniture purchases. By using this research, we were able to calculate the number of owners a piece would need to reduce its carbon footprint.
    • Ambrose Heal At Home: A Glimpse Into The Private Collection Of The Famed Furniture Designer
      Heritage
      Ambrose Heal At Home: A Glimpse Into The Private Collection Of The Famed Furniture Designer
      Words: Cross Nelson Sir Ambrose Heal is a name that is very much associated with London, especially since Heal and Son has been at the same address on Tottenham Court Road since 1818. However, when he was not in London Heal could be found in the Buckinghamshire countryside at his home, Baylins Farm. A world apart from the bustle of Tottenham Court Road, Baylins Farm is a 15th-century farmhouse that was converted by Heal into an Arts and Crafts style haven in 1919. It is tempting to imagine what the private space of a furniture designer might look like, and what sort of objects he might surround himself with, and thankfully, the house has been almost perfectly preserved to give us a look into the private collection of Ambrose Heal. Today, the house is still lived in by Heal’s grandson, Oliver Heal, but it is not open to the public, so these photos provide a window into the collection of furniture and art that makes Baylins Farm such a remarkable home. View of the front of Baylins Farm, with the inlaid brick ‘H’ for HealHeal bought Baylins Farm in 1919 with his wife, Edith, and together the couple made the renovation of the house a collaborative project. To mark their ownership of the home in a truly medieval way, their initials 'A' and 'E' can be found cast on the front rainwater hoppers on the exterior, and an 'H' was inlaid into the bricks next to them, as seen in the photo above. Not only was the project a collaboration between the two of them, but also a collaboration with other contemporary craftsmen and artists all working in the Arts and Crafts style. Heal was a follower of the Arts and Crafts movement, which was rooted in the return to the handicrafts of the medieval age as a reaction against the advanced industrialisation replacing human made art with machine made art. Considering how influential the Arts and Crafts philosophy was to the design of Heal’s furniture, it is no surprise that he wanted to live in a space which exemplified that very philosophy. By renovating a medieval farm house into his home, he was quite literally reviving the medieval period to exist in the 20th century. Baylins Farm dates from 1450, with an addition of a first floor in 1563, and when the house was renovated, the architects were able to preserve the original timber frames. One of the most Arts and Crafts features of the home are the 1563 timber beams on the parlour ceiling, which were painted with multi-colored, gilded designs by the artist MacDonald Gill in 1920. Hand painted ceilings were a traditional medieval practice, yet this was a very avant-garde choice on Heal’s behalf since painted ceilings were by no means a 20th-century fashion. Fortunately, the ceiling still remains in the same manner today, timeless over a century later. View of the parlour with the 1920 painted ceiling by MacDonald GillJust below the ceiling is another one of Heal’s creative embellishments to the room, a fireplace decorated with painted tiles showing the signs of the zodiac and the four winds surrounding the sun. These tiles were painted by Minnie McLeish, who designed textiles for Heal and Son, and so they represent yet another important collaboration between Heal and contemporary artists of the time. The collaboration on these tiles goes even further since Heal actually corresponded with the Directors of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew and Kew Observatory, and the Astronomer Royal at Greenwich, to ensure they were executed accurately. It is this acute attention to detail that made Heal and his designs so successful. Detail of the astrological fireplace tiles designed by Minnie McLeishNext to the parlour is the dining room, furnished with a dining table and chairs, both designed by Heal himself. What is especially remarkable about Heal using his own furniture in the home, is that models of these pieces were also sold at Heal and Son on Tottenham Court Road. His mission was to create well designed furniture that was available to everyone, and the fact that he furnished his own home with this furniture guarantees how much he believed in his products. Another important layer to the history of this dining set is that Heal showed both of these products at the Arts and Craft Exhibition, the table in 1912 and the chairs in 1916. By displaying these pieces at a design trade show like the Arts and Crafts Exhibition demonstrates that Heal not only saw his furniture as commercial products, but also as thoughtfully designed pieces of art. The chestnut dining table and chairs designed by Ambrose HealStanding just across from the dining table is another exceptional piece of Arts and Crafts furniture that was a collaborative project between Heal and the furniture maker Sidney Barnsley. Barnsley was one of the leading furniture makers of the Cotswold School, a group of craftsmen who produced handmade furniture using traditional vernacular techniques and local woods of the Cotswold district. Their similar Arts and Crafts approach to furniture design lent itself well to a collaboration, and in 1923, Heal commissioned Barnsley to make him a sideboard for the dining room at Baylins Farm. The commission was an interesting one, because rather than Barnsley designing the sideboard on his own, a series of letters between the two craftsmen reveals that they sent drawings back and forth until they arrived at a final design together. In the end, Barnsley sent the sideboard to Baylins Farm, and so the project was completed without the two craftsmen ever meeting. Like the dining set and the timber beams, the sideboard is also still used by the family to this day, exactly a century later. Oak sideboard designed collaboratively by Ambrose Heal and Sidney BarnsleyWhile there are numerous other pieces of furniture to discuss, the final piece that will be mentioned is one of the most mysterious objects in Heal’s collection. In the living room, underneath the painted ceiling sits an equally colourful, painted wooden chest. While there is no documentation by Heal of how he obtained this chest, a clue to where it comes from is painted on the lid. On top of the chest is painted, 'Paris' and '1900', indicating that it came from the 1900 Paris Exposition Universelle. Heal and Son had their own booth at the Paris Exposition, and so it is most likely that Heal brought this chest back with him from Paris after the exposition closed. Labels inside the chest written in Swedish reveal that it was made by Gustaf Flinta, a furniture maker from Hedemora, Sweden, who displayed this piece in the Swedish Pavilion at the exposition. It is unclear how or why Heal selected this chest to bring back to England, or if he even met Gustaf Flinta, but it is known that he was an admirer of Swedish design. Only a year earlier, Heal received one of the first commissions of his career to design furniture for the Standard Hotel in Norrköping, Sweden, and this sparked his lifelong admiration for Swedish design. Even at Baylins Farm the chest is not the only Swedish object, and there is a cylindrical Swedish tile stove that Heal had imported from Uppsala in what was originally the children’s playroom. So, it may be assumed that he wanted this chest as both a souvenir of the Paris Exposition and a symbol of his love for Swedish decorative arts. Regardless of the reason, the chest and the Swedish stove add an international layer to his collection, expressing the idea that he wanted to synthesise both domestic and foreign objects that were all united by their Arts and Crafts qualities. Lid of the Swedish painted chest by Gustaf Flinta From the ceiling, to the dining room, to the chest, these are just some examples of the many important works that decorate Baylins Farm. Each object seems in dialogue with the other, creating a feeling of thoughtful interior design, but more importantly, thoughtful collecting. The entire house feels distinctively Heal, in that it is an extension of the principles of Heal’s business model to blend modernity with tradition, united by the timelessness of high quality craftsmanship. It is a rarity that such a well preserved Arts and Crafts interior still exists today, and the fact that Heal’s own family still lives in the home over a century later shows that he was not only designing for his generation, but for the future. Swedish tiled stove by E.G. Aspland imported from Uppsala, Sweden (image: Jo Baldwin) *For further reading on Ambrose Heal and the history of Heal and Son, please refer to Oliver Heal’s book, Sir Ambrose Heal and the Heal Cabinet Factory 1897-1939. For further reading on Heal’s designs for the Standard Hotel in Sweden, please refer to Oliver Heal’s article in the 2004 Furniture History Society Journal, ‘Ambrose Heal in Sweden, 1899.’ All images are taken by the author or Oliver Heal except where noted.