The story starts with a man and a beech forest. In 1861 Michael Thonet, the cabinetmaker who had worked out how to steam solid beech rods and bend them into curves without cracking them, built a factory at Bystřice pod Hostýnem in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire and is now the Czech Republic. He chose the place for its beech woods, its labour and its closeness to the railway. Its bestseller, Chair No. 14, was shipped disassembled all over the world and is widely called the first mass-produced piece of furniture. By 1913 the Bystřice works employed more than two thousand people and turned out over half a million chairs a year.

The twentieth century did its best to break the company and did not manage it. In 1924 Thonet merged with its rivals Mundus and Kohn to form Thonet Mundus, then the largest furniture company in the world, and Bystřice kept designing. August Thonet's Chair No. 30 became a favourite of Le Corbusier, and in 1930 Josef Hoffmann, working with Oswald Haerdtl, drew the A811 that is still in the catalogue. War, occupation and nationalisation followed. The factory was taken out of the Thonet Mundus group after the war, carried the Thonet name for another eight years, and in 1953 became part of a new Czechoslovak enterprise called TON, a name taken from the Czech for bentwood furniture factories. In 1994 it became the joint stock company it is today.

What has not changed is the bending. TON still steams and bends solid beech on the same site, using the technique the factory was built around, and says plainly that on the difficult work the human still beats the robot. Where machines help, the company has largely developed them in its own workshops. Wood is chosen piece by piece for strength, flexibility and appearance, frames are sanded by hand, and quality is checked at five points between the log yard and the loading dock. The furniture carries a ten year warranty, and the wood is FSC certified.

One clarification is worth making. TON is not Thonet GmbH in Germany, nor Gebrüder Thonet Vienna in Italy. The three companies share an ancestor and little else. TON is the original factory, in the original town, doing the original work, which is why its chairs sit under so many café and restaurant tables in Europe without anyone stopping to ask where they came from. That quiet ubiquity is the point. This is furniture that survives a commercial fitout because it was built to survive a century.