Vintage French Nailhead Club Chair

Pale where you would lean, dark where you would not. Leather keeps a very clear record.

Here is a vintage French nailhead club chair in cow leather, with brass nails and an antique finish. French makers helped popularize the leather club chair as a low, generous seat for reading, smoking and conversation in the early decades of the 20th century. This one is square-armed and boxy, with a loose back pillow and a thick seat cushion in caramel hide, looking worn and cracked across the front. Dark round nailheads march along every edge in double lines. Twenty-nine and a half inches long, thirty-one and a half high.

Few new chairs have the nerve to look like this.