Barcelona Chair vs Womb Chair: Which Knoll Icon Should You Buy

Ask a designer to name the two great modernist lounge chairs and you will usually get the same pair: a steel-and-leather throne from 1929 and a fiberglass shell built to be curled up in, from 1948. Both are made today by Knoll, both start at exactly the same list price, and they could hardly be more different to live with. The Barcelona Chair is architecture you can sit on. The Womb Chair is a basket of pillows with legs. Here is the story behind each, how they compare on size, comfort and craft, and which one we would buy.

The quick answer

• Buy the Womb Chair if the chair is for actually sitting in: reading, napping, scrolling with your legs pulled up. It accepts every posture, and it is the one you will use.
• Buy the Barcelona Chair if the room is the point: an entry, a studio, an office lounge or a living room where you want an upright, sculptural object that looks as good empty as occupied.
• Add the matching ottoman or stool either way. Both chairs are designed as part of a pair, and both ottomans are sold separately.

Barcelona: a chair designed for a king

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe created the Barcelona Chair for his 1929 German Pavilion at the International Exhibition in Barcelona, and the pavilion gave the chair its name. The building is among the most famous in modern architecture, and the chair was made to sit inside it as part of one composition. Knoll describes the design as epitomizing Mies's best-known maxim, less is more: a crisscross frame, a canted seat, and nothing else.

How it reached your living room is a story about teachers and students. Florence Knoll studied architecture under Mies at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and he was a trusted mentor to her. He granted Knoll the production rights to the Barcelona Collection, and it has been a signature of the company ever since. Every chair is still built to his specifications.

The craft is the part most buyers do not know. The cushions are made from 40 individual squares of leather, suede or fabric, each hand-welted and hand-tufted with buttons. In the leather version, all the squares come from a single cowhide, which is why the color and grain read as one piece. The cushions are held to the frame by cowhide belting straps with edges dyed to match, and the polished chrome or ultra-matte onyx frame is hand-ground and hand-buffed. The frame is stamped with the Knoll logo and Mies's signature, which is how you authenticate a real one for life.

Womb: a basket full of pillows

The Womb Chair began with a request. Florence Knoll asked her old Cranbrook friend Eero Saarinen for a chair that was like a basket full of pillows, something she could really curl up in. He delivered it in the late 1940s. It debuted in 1948 as the Model 70, and Saarinen filed a patent for his shaped chair. The organic form and the way it welcomed every posture earned it the name Womb Chair, and Saarinen explained the thinking with a line Knoll still prints on the product page: "Now, more than ever, we need to relax."

It was a technical leap as much as a comfort one. The seat is a perfectly padded, reinforced fiberglass shell, a material that let Saarinen form one continuous curve that wood and metal could not. Underneath the upholstery sits a plywood platform and a foam core wrapped in polyester fiber, held on a slim steel rod frame in black powder coat, polished chrome or gold plate. Knoll says a team of skilled artisans shapes the shell and stitches the seams by hand, and that it is made to the original specifications. The authentic chair carries a Knoll authentication stamp or label on the underframe.

Barcelona vs Womb compared

How they sit, and how they fit

The numbers in the table tell the comfort story before any showroom visit does. The Barcelona has a 19 5/8 inch seat depth, a 17 inch seat height and a canted seat that Knoll says holds the sitter in a relaxed yet supported position. It is a posture chair: you sit in it, you do not sink into it. If you want it softer, Knoll offers a relaxed cushion style with a softer urethane foam, an extra Dacron layer and a more supple, casual look.

The Womb is built on the opposite idea. Its standard seat is 24 7/8 inches deep, deep enough to sit sideways, cross your legs or pull your knees up, and the shell wraps around you. That is the entire design brief. It is also a bigger object: 40 inches wide and 34 inches deep in standard, so measure the room before you fall in love. Knoll makes a medium size at 35 inches wide with an 18 inch seat depth, a better choice for smaller rooms and for shorter people, and it rates the standard chair to 275 pounds.

The Barcelona is the one to choose if you sit upright, and the one that makes a room look designed. Its open frame lets you see through it and the floor beneath it, so it takes up less visual space than its footprint suggests. The Womb is a solid mass of upholstery, a statement in itself, and it needs room to breathe.

The craft and the price

On Knoll's own store in mid-November, both chairs were listed at $6,828 and both were marked 30 percent off for the Black Friday sale, at $4,779.60. That is the single most useful fact in this comparison: price cannot break the tie, because there is no price gap. The matching pieces cost extra. The Womb Ottoman was listed at $2,191, or $1,533.70 on sale, and the Womb Chair and Ottoman set at $9,398, or $6,578.60 on sale. The Barcelona Stool was $3,228, or $2,421 on sale, and the Barcelona Table $3,210, or $2,247 on sale. Prices change with upholstery and finish, and sales end, so build the chair you want on the page before you compare.

What you are paying for is hand labor and authenticity. Knoll produces both under license from the original designs, with a stamped frame on the Barcelona and a stamped underframe on the Womb. Many lookalikes exist at a fraction of the price, and we would not buy one expecting the same chair. If an authentic piece is out of reach, a secondhand authentic one with the stamp intact is a better route than a copy.

Which Knoll icon should you buy

• The reader, the napper, the person who lives in a living room: the Womb Chair, in standard if you have the space.
• A smaller room or a shorter sitter: the Womb Chair in medium, with its 18 inch seat depth.
• A studio, entry hall, home office or design-led lounge: the Barcelona Chair, ideally a pair with a Barcelona Table between them.
• Someone who wants a softer Barcelona: the relaxed cushion option.
• The person buying only one chair for the whole house: the Womb, because it is the one that gets used every day.

Our call

Our call: buy the Womb Chair. Both are important, both are beautifully made and both cost the same, so the deciding question is how you will use it. For most homes the answer is sitting, and the Womb was designed from a single request for a chair you can curl up in, with a deep shell and a deep seat that welcomes any posture. Buy the Barcelona instead if the room matters more than the sitting, because nothing else looks as light, as precise or as clearly like a piece of architecture. If you can only choose one and you are not sure, choose the one you will sit in.

More furniture history: read our guides to the Saarinen Tulip Chair, the Wassily Chair and the Aeron vs Embody comparison. More like this: browse every related post in our Design Icons Hub.