Gudmundur Ludvik's Backflip and the Chair That Belongs on the Wall

September 27, 2026

There is an old habit in rooms that have to serve more than one purpose: the chair leaves the floor. In the nineteenth century, the Shaker communities in America ran wooden peg rails along the walls of their buildings and hung almost everything from them, chairs included, so that floors could be swept and rooms cleared. The chairs were often hung upside down. As Lesley Herzberg, curator at Hancock Shaker Village in Massachusetts, has explained, this was so that dust would not gather on the seat.

The Shakers came to America from England in the late eighteenth century, and at their height in the nineteenth century some 6,000 members lived in nearly two dozen communities between Maine and Kentucky. Their furniture is remembered for its restraint, yet much of that restraint was practical. A chair that is lifted onto a wall several times a week has to be light, and it has to look as considered from below as from above. By the 1860s, the community at New Lebanon in New York had made the production of ladder back chairs one of its core businesses.

A row of Backflip chairs by Gudmundur Ludvik for HAY, some folded and hung on wall brackets, others standing open beneath them

The idea returned in Danish modernism. In 1949, Hans J. Wegner presented a folding chair alongside his Round Chair at the Cabinetmakers' Guild autumn exhibition, the show that marked his breakthrough. Folded, that chair was meant to hang on the wall, where it reads less as furniture put away than as an object placed on display.

Most folding chairs, however, are designed for the moment they disappear rather than for the hours they are used. Exposed hinges, thin seats and a certain wobble are the usual price of flexibility. Gudmundur Ludvik has described the type in exactly these terms: "Folding chairs have long represented a unique challenge for me. They are objects full of inherent conflict, where functionality often comes at the expense of aesthetics, comfort, or both."

Backflip chairs in white, black, golden, green, red and blue lacquered beech arranged loosely across a pale studio floor

Backflip, his new chair for HAY, previewed at 3 Days of Design in Copenhagen earlier this year, begins from that conflict. At first sight it is a conventional wooden dining chair with a solid beech frame and a moulded plywood backrest. The folding mechanism sits within the backrest, and the chair closes and opens in one smooth motion. Nothing about its posture suggests that it is meant to be temporary.

That the solution lies in construction rather than in hardware says something about its designer. Born in Iceland in 1970, Ludvik trained as a carpenter and worked in construction before studying sculpture at the Icelandic Academy of Arts. In 1999 he moved to Copenhagen to study furniture design at the Royal Danish Academy, graduating in 2002, and in 2010 he founded the industrial design studio Welling/Ludvik with his former fellow student Hee Welling. Today he works from Vejle in Denmark, with a practice built on a close knowledge of materials and of how things are produced.

Close view of folded Backflip chairs in several colours, showing the pivot points where the backrest meets the beech frame

The materials are chosen for that logic. Moulded plywood is made from thin layers of veneer, laid crosswise to one another and bonded under heat and pressure in a shaped press. The alternating grain gives a curved panel considerable strength at a low weight, while the frame of solid beech, a dense and even hardwood, carries the load. Backflip comes in natural beech and in six water based lacquers, Golden, Bronze, Cedar Green, Cloud Blue, Anthracite and Cream White, and in most of them the grain of the wood remains visible beneath the colour.

It was essential to me that it should not feel like secondary seating or something of lesser value.

Folded Backflip chairs leaning together in a compact stack against a white wall

Ludvik's remark points to something folding chairs rarely manage. They tend to be the chairs brought out for guests and returned to a cupboard afterwards, a second class of seating. Backflip is meant to be the chair at the table every day, one that happens to fold. Rolf Hay, co-founder and creative director of HAY, put it simply: "Looks can be deceiving. There's something intelligent and original behind it."

The Backflip Wall Bracket brings the story back to the Shaker room. Made in beech, it consists of two horizontal rods that hold one or two folded chairs against the wall. Hung in rows, the chairs form a quiet pattern of colour and line, and the floor beneath them is left clear.

Six folded Backflip chairs in green, blue, white, black, red and golden finishes hung in two rows on wall brackets

The chair has always carried more than the body. As an earlier piece in this journal traced, it has stood for rank, ceremony and belonging long before it became an everyday object. The folding chair belongs to a different lineage, closer to the camp, the workshop and the meeting hall, to rooms that change their use in the course of a day. HAY, which has worked with designers such as Ana Kraš on objects for daily life, sees Backflip in private and public settings alike, for daily as well as occasional use.

A black Backflip chair at a white desk in a studio, with a golden Backflip chair folded and hung on the wall behind

Small homes have made this old question urgent again. When a single room is a place to eat, work and receive people, furniture that can step aside becomes a form of architecture. The Shakers solved it with a rail of pegs and a rule about dust. Ludvik has solved it inside a backrest.

A golden Backflip chair folded on a wall bracket above a pale blue Backflip chair standing open