Some of the best design ideas are catalysed by something already in existence - a muse, an homage, an instinct drawn from inspiration. This month, we were invited by Vinterior, the online home for vintage furniture to join their annual Second Hand September campaign. Vinterior commissioned five British brands to take a single chair from its archive of over 400,000 pieces and reimagine it, unmistakably, in their own style: no prescribed aesthetic, no room to match, just one chair transformed through craft, fabric and signature.
The chair we chose was a B&B Italia Metropolitan ME84 armchair, designed by Jeffrey Bernett in 2002 and prized ever since for a seat, back and armrest that flow into one another as a single uninterrupted line, and on a swivel base built to look considered from every angle. We reupholstered it in a wool houndstooth from our upcoming Winter '26 collection, run through in contrasting green and pink.
"It's a very architectural chair, quite formal and sculptural in its silhouette - very much a product of its era," says Oli. "We wanted a fabric that would soften that a little and give it some warmth, so we went with a big-scale houndstooth in green and pink rather than the usual black and white. Houndstooth has always had that slightly rebellious quality that runs through a lot of what we do, so it felt right against something so precisely engineered. The contrast in the colourway lets the shape of the chair speak while still looking unmistakably Oliver Spencer."
The finished piece now sits in the window of our Lamb's Conduit Street shop, ahead of joining the rest of Vinterior's Sit Differently collection. For the content, we sat a cross-section of the Oliver Spencer team — from the design studio to the shop floor — in the reupholstered chair and asked each of them a handful of quick fire questions about the piece.
"It's one chair, but put five different people in it and you get five different chairs back," says Oli. "That felt like the right way to finish what we started with Vinterior - the fabric and the silhouette are our interpretation, but everyone who actually sits in it brings their own history to it too. That's the whole point of Secondhand September, really: nothing pre-owned ever really has just one story."
To view the chair on Vinterior's website, click here.
