Dezeen’s A-Zdvent calendar: Rover Chair by Ron Arad

It’s a very interesting exercise.»
Dezeen is publishing an A to Z of   iconic chairs to count down the days until Christmas. «I’ve noticed in auctions that a red one fetches twice as much as any other colour,» added Arad, who is one of the only collectible contemporary designers on the art market according to French auction house Artcurial. The Rover Chair was   produced using discarded seats from vehicles made by the now-defunct British car company of the same name. Israeli-born designer Ron Arad made his first Rover Chair in 1981 after he grew tired of his job at   an architect’s practice in north London. Catch up with the list so far » The seat is set to make a return to production as an updated version next year. «I kept the first two and they were in the house and my daughters grew up on them and the cat sat on them. Ron Arad   said he «hardly designed anything» when creating his readymade Rover Chair, which is next up in our festive A-Zdvent calendar. A year later Arad said fashion designer   Jean Paul Gaultier knocked on the door and asked to buy six. «I hardly designed anything – it was all readymade,» Arad added. «It’s going to be different — it’s going to be like the new Mini to the old Mini, like the new Fiat 500 to the old Fiat 500,» explained Arad. «I felt it was more to do with [Marcel] Duchamp and found objects than it was with [Jean] Prouvé   or [Marcel] Breuer and with furniture design, but I was wrong because I once found a photograph of a chair by Prouvé that looks amazingly like it.»
The first chairs were manufactured by Arad at his studio in Covent Garden and Rolf Fehlbaum, the chairman   of design brand Vitra, was one of the first people to turn up and buy one. Then, when they were exhibited at my show No Discipline at the Pompidou Centre I was told off for touching my own chair without wearing white gloves.»
The earliest versions were made using red seats from the Rover P6 and the designer claimed he thought all Rover seats were red before eventually discovering the more common beige and black versions. «It was so successful it was boring so I declared the last hundred,» Arad said.