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They command spectacular prices—but is a chair designed by an architect really any better than one by a furniture designer? Ruth Metzstein talks to the people putting bums on seats

Alex Michaelis is an archetypal London architect. Linen shirt, strong hands, zipping from desk to desk in his former-church-hall office with its industrial lighting, white desks and parquet flooring. Today he is particularly fired up: his practice—Michaelis Boyd, founded with Tim Boyd in 1995—has landed the job of designing flats for the multi-million-pound conversion of Battersea Power Station. The pair have projects around the world (Michaelis is just off the red-eye from Johannesburg) and get plenty of work from the west-London elite—they bolted the now-infamous wind turbine onto David Cameron’s old home. So what is he doing messing around with chairs?

“I love chairs. In my house I have a huge number that I love—and, yes,” he admits, “it’s all the architect ones.” By this, he means what others might call design classics: Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona chair, Le Corbusier’s Grand Confort, Eero Saarinen’s Womb chair. Even if you’re not familiar with their names, you’ll have seen them. Acres of travertine-floored lobby are scattered with the slack, steel X of the Barcelona, while the Womb, as enveloping as its name suggests, is a favourite of expensive hotels. Though these chairs are more than 60 years old, all are still in production—and all were designed by architects.

Pretty much every architect in the alphabet has produced a chair, a miniature version of their particular aesthetic. Frank Gehry’s Wiggle side chair is all playful corrugated cardboard; Norman Foster’s 20-06 Stacker is more characteristically ascetic. Zaha Hadid’s Z-chair is an evocative, egotistical zig-zag of stainless steel, reportedly fetching upwards of £150,000. Most recently, David Adjaye’s Washington designs for the furniture manufacturer Knoll are a seemingly wilful complication—why have a leg on each corner when you can cantilever the seat and add support struts? Buildings are all very well, but it seems you haven’t truly made it as an architect until you’ve given us something to sit on.

And we can’t get enough of them. As the celebrity of architects grows, products with their names attached become ever more attractive—and expensive. Recently, Phillips auction house devoted an entire sale to “The Architect”, with furniture lots including a fluid, cantilevered armchair by Alvar Aalto from 1931, sold for £23,750, and a prototype of an aluminium stackable chair by Alfred Roth, sold for £31,250.