Kandalama Lounge Chair

In the early 1990s, Geoffrey Bawa was gifted a ‘Ripple’ chair—the corrugated iron lounge chair designed by Australian architect Russell Hall. Impressed by the way its curved iron took on this swirling, organic form, he gave it pride of place in his Lunuganga garden.

Bawa decided to create a companion piece for Hall’s corrugated iron chair, but immediately faced a problem: the material, machinery, and skills required to fashion those expressive curves did not exist in Sri Lanka at the time. He countered this by using the form of the Ripple chair as a springboard, but modified it, replacing the corrugated iron with wrought iron flats that his local metalworker could shape. Instead of placing them next to each other, the flats were spaced out and held together with crude welds, maintaining the Ripple’s fluid sculptural form while allowing for freer air circulation. It was a classic Bawa bricolage: to seize upon some eccentric object, graft a foreign idiom onto local needs and resources, and somehow, conjure up an object that outstripped the sum of its scavenged parts.

As with most of his designs, the first prototypes made their way to his Number 11 home in Colombo, as well as to the gardens of Lunuganga, where, as he once pointed out, they looked like “slender plant stems growing out of the grass.” It was an impossibly romantic idea, but the kind that is difficult to unsee once you see it.

In 1994, Bawa had these chairs made for the Kandalama Hotel (now Heritance Kandalama), where they can be seen even today. In 1997, while speaking at an exhibition of Bawa’s work in Brisbane, Hall graciously expressed his admiration for Bawa’s reinterpretation of his chair.

Phantom Hands’ re-edition of the Kandalama Lounge Chair is made from aluminium flats to reduce the chair’s overall weight and allow for easier shipping. While custom jigs were designed to offer precise curve alignment and consistency, the chair is created entirely by hand—from the initial welding, to hand-bending the aluminium flats around the jigs, to screwing on the rivets so the flats are secured in place and maintain their shape. The chair is available in a natural anodised aluminium finish.