Motor City Seating

“We’re pumped by Detroit,” says industrial designer and metal fabricator Michael Chetcuti. He is one of the two men (along with Camilo Pardo, designer of the Ford GT sports car) behind Merkury HG’s new line of furniture consisting of a table, lamp, and chair. “We’re leveraging auto technologies,” he explains. The designs incorporate the thick aluminum sheets most often used in car manufacturing. The Merkury Lounge chair, which weighs 500 pounds, is designed in CAD and then assembled from thirty-three aluminum slats cut with a waterjet. These slats fit onto a supporting base structure, also aluminum. At the moment, the collaboration with Pardo is still a side project and the furniture is made in ultra-limited, ultra-expensive ($29,000 for the chair) editions.