Marcel Gascoin is the name behind some of the warmest wooden furniture of postwar France. His new chair is the opposite: black metal legs, a fully upholstered body and a backrest that seems to hover. The M-Chair was designed in 1937, long before the work that made him famous, and the Danish company GUBI has now developed it from archival references and put it into production as part of its Fall 2026 collection.
A chair from before the wood
Most people who know Gascoin know him for modular storage and matching sets of clean, practical wooden furniture. After the Second World War, he worked as an interior architect and designer for the French Ministry of Reconstruction and Urbanism, designing homes during the housing crisis and the furniture to fill them. That work became a staple in French households.
The M-Chair comes from an earlier, sharper chapter, and you can see the modernist influence in the lines. GUBI calls it a more graphic, architectural language, and that is right. This is a dining chair that looks drawn with a fine pen.
The floating backrest
The trick is in how it is built. Most upholstered chairs mount the back from behind, with a frame or brackets you can see. On the M-Chair, the backrest grows straight out of the seat construction instead, so the two pads read as separate shapes with a gap of air between them. From the side, the back looks like it is floating.
Underneath, four slender tapered metal legs in a black matte finish keep everything light. The proportions are compact, so it can sit around a small round table at home or line up in a restaurant without taking over the room. GUBI offers it in a range of upholsteries, including Kvadrat's Asator velour and Dedar's Amuleto, so it can go quiet and neutral or rich and tactile depending on the fabric.
Who Gascoin was
Gascoin (1907 to 1986) was a member of the UAM, the French Union of Modern Artists, alongside Charlotte Perriand, Robert Mallet-Stevens, René Herbst and Le Corbusier. The group's whole idea was uniting good design with real manufacturing, and Gascoin took it seriously, building some of the first modular, multifunctional furniture sets for ordinary homes.
He was also a teacher. Several apprentices from his workshop went on to big careers, including Pierre Paulin, Michel Mortier and Joseph-André Motte. If you have ever sat in a Paulin chair, you are sitting in part of Gascoin's legacy. GUBI's Gascoin page collects the rest of his pieces it produces, including the C-Chair.
Price and availability
GUBI's US store lists the M-Chair at $999 in Kvadrat Asator with a matte black base, item number 10154043. When we checked Thursday morning, the US page showed a "Notify me when available" button rather than an order button, so sign up there if you want one early. The rest of the season is laid out in GUBI's Fall 2026 collection.
Reissues of lost designs can feel like catalog filler. This one does not. It is a real piece of design history that almost nobody has seen, and it looks more current than half of what launched this year. For more chairs with a story, read our explainer on the Eames Lounge Chair and our guide to the Bauhaus. To build the bookshelf, see our best design books.
