IKEA is in everyone’s face and ears at the moment. and probably the word on most people’s lips. Well, at least anyone within range of their first mega store in New Zealand.

So here are a few questions relating to furniture.

1. Which item became the world’s very first mass-produced furniture item ?
2. What did Michael Thonet invent ?
3. What item won the coveted gold medal at the 1867 World Fair in Paris ?
4. What do James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, Oscar Wilde, Victor Hugo, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernest Hemmingway, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Dora Maar, Joan Miró, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and other painters and poets, writers and raconteurs, from backgrounds both bourgeois and impoverished, have in common ?
5. What did IKEA create in 1961 in homage to a specific item of furniture ?

You will find all the answers in this Good Life France article  which begins Nobody sits like the French and in which Charles Pappas, author of Nobody Sits like the French: Exploring Paris Through its World Expos, looks at the incredible history of the bistro chair, an iconic feature of cafés, bistros and restaurants not just in Paris but throughout France.

And one more question this great article cannot know :

6. We can’t all get to Paris so:
   In which cafés in the Bay of Plenty can you sit on a bistrot chair and watch the world go by ?

Send an email to shelley@lovefrench.nz with recommendations that can be shared.

As the article concludes: “You can’t write like Hemingway, paint like Picasso, or philosophize like Sartre, but you can sit like them.”

Photos:  Janine Marsh
Above: Red bistro chairs are a Paris favourite!
Below: Bistro chairs at Café Nemours, near the Louvre