Post #468312 by aquarj on Sat, Jul 11, 2009 12:42 PM

I couldn't decide whether to put this in Beyond, Events, General, or the "Tiki faces in strange places" thread, so forgive me if somewhere else is better. Thought this might be a little fun.

We have a chair in our house that we've always called the Suffering Bastard chair, because of a vague resemblance to the mug/decanter with that name (aka Mai Tai Joe). Here's the chair and the Tiki Farm repro of the mug...

But in truth, that name doesn't do justice to what we consider a very nicely designed lounge chair. It's made by Dux, and I think the product line started around the mid-50s. The chair was designed by Folke Ohlsson, the president and head designer for Dux. According to the Lushpad site, Ohlsson moved to the US from Sweden in 1953, and established DUX, Inc. in San Francisco the same year. So I always had the impression that Dux was a scandinavian company, and it sort of was, but actually it was based in California.

Dux is a fairly well-known name among midcentury enthusiasts, and some of their designs were very popular. I'm not positive, but I think the same lounge chair above was in the movie Christmas Story.

Sadly, Ohlsson passed away in 2003. So, unfortunately it's a bit last minute to post this now, but there is an estate sale at Folke Ohlsson's former house in Atherton this weekend. We visited the house and the estate sale yesterday, and it was really fun to see how he applied his design sense to his own house. It's not a massive palace, but a very light, attractive midcentury house. Here's a photo of the front entry yesterday.

The house has been sold, but there were still some interesting things inside. Here is the craigslist listing for the estate sale with details (I'm not duplicating the estate sale info in this post, because it contains the address, which should expire with the craigslist listing instead of remaining in this thread, out of respect for the privacy of the future residents of the house).

-Randy