Cassina Teams up With One Block Down on Limited-Edition Zig Zag Chair

Italian brand Cassina has tapped One Block Down for a new collaboration. Together, the brand and retailer have worked on a new interpretation of the iconic Zig Zag chair, originally created by Dutch design master Gerrit Rietveld in the 1930s. The result is a limited-edition run of 30 pieces, which each see the wooden chair covered in metal.

Debuted during Milan Design Week, the collaboration stemmed from One Block Down’s deep delve into the chair’s history. The team was particularly inspired by its seemingly unstable form, which is made structurally sound by dove-tail joints at its cantilevered sections. They explored this notion further through an installation in the city, for which they stacked 30 of the chairs to form a pyramid – “it looks precarious while, in reality, is anything but,” they said.

On its design, One Block Down said:

“One Block Down’s limited-edition iteration of the iconic structure features metal added from an aesthetic point of view. The Zig Zag’s distinctive shape remains intact in this special production for One Block Down.

The chair’s iconic wooden structure is overlaid with sheet metal panels – a nod to One Block Down’s architecture – and, while these two opposing materials keep their natural feel, light manipulates its raw surfaces to create a sinuous form that almost seems to change shape.”

The limited-edition Zig Zag chair was one of a number of new pieces launched by Cassina during Salone del Mobile. The brand also revealed a collaboration with Virgil Abloh, a glass-topped table that made HYPEBEAST’s list of the must-have pieces on show during the festival, and an abstract room divider by Italian design icon Gaetano Pesce.

The One Block Down x Cassina Zig Zag chair is available to purchase now, for €1,850 (approximately $1,946 USD).