Fleurville debuts highchair at ICFF
Lisa Casinger -- Kids Today, 7/1/2006
San Rafael, Calif.-based Fleurville has teamed up with industrial designer Yves Béhar to create its Calla highchair, which debuted at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York in May.
Though the highchair is a departure for Fleurville, known for its diaper bags and accessories, co-founder Steve Granville said diversifying was always the plan.
"When my wife Catherine and I started the company, we came at it from a branded perspective," Granville said. "We wanted a company that could go in many directions."
Fleurville's soft goods fall under it's Mobile Family group, while the highchair is the anchor of its At Home group.
The Granvilles researched different niches in the market where there hadn't been a lot of innovative design focus and once they decided on making a highchair they recruited Behar's company fuseproject. Behar, an award-winning designer, has worked with clients like Birkenstock, MINI, Herman Miller, Nike, Microsoft, Swarovski and Target.
"We aren't classically-trained product designers and we knew if we got into furniture we wanted to do it right and do something above our abilities," Granville said. "We wanted to hook up with someone up and coming in the design word; someone who knew what products can do instead of what they can't."
The Granvilles outlined the functions they knew the highchair had to have and the functions they wanted it to have and provided examples of "visually stunning, typically Italian" existing chairs as the springboard for the design.
The highchair for modern life, as it's been tagged, has a futuristic, unconventional look. Its sculptural aesthetic is achieved by grafting a polycarbonate flute to a stem with a circular base of solid aluminum. The resulting overhang enables greater proximity to the child while feeding, thereby lessening the repetitive strain of hand to mouth. The seat can be customized using an insert to fit the child's size and color of the kitchen. A choice of two inserts, one for 4 to 12 months and the other for 12 months to 2 years, enables the child to grow with the chair, while adjustable neoprene-covered security straps provide maximum safety. The chair also features a brake system, quiet, polyurethane wheels and a removable top tray for easy dishwasher cleaning. Calla will hit retail stores this fall and be available in yellow, with orange and red colorways to follow; the suggested retail is $925 to $950.
Calla, the highchair for modern life, merges form, function and style for parents looking for something different.
