Verner Panton’s Bond villain chair goes back into production
The Pantonova series was originally made for a Danish restaurant, but later found fame in a bad guy's lair
We don’t know much about the forthcoming James Bond film, scheduled for release in 2020, other than it will be Daniel Craig’s last; his Aston Martin will probably be electric; and Rami Malik is in talks to play the film’s villain. However, if the set designers want to complement these contemporary touches with a few mid-century additions, there’s plenty to choose from, thanks in part to Danish design firm, Montana.
It has reissued Verner Panton’s Pantonova wire-frame furniture (1971), which, as our Verner Panton book explains, ”was produced for Restaurant Varna in Aarhus, Denmark,” and “featured chairs that could be easily combined and optional cushions positioned as desired.”
These shiny, cage-like seats found greater fame beyond Denmark, in 1977, when Pantonova sofas dressed the Sardinian lair of the evil shipping tycoon, Karl Stromberg in the bond film, The Spy Who Loved Me; you can see them around the 0:33 and 0:41 points in the trailer, below.
In that movie, Stromberg, played by Curt Jurgens, planned to start a nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the USA. Thankfully, that particular fictional scenario has been confined to history, while the new Montana version of the chairs have been resurrected, and look remarkably well suited to contemporary use. It comes in three distinct shapes: linear, concave and convex, allowing users to arrange a line of seats in almost any shape, and the cushions are available in both leather and fabric, and in a range of colours. Perhaps we’ll see Malik seated on one of them, dreaming up some dastardly plan, sometime next year.
For more on this brilliant Danish designer’s work, order a copy of our Verner Panton book here.