The Hudson Chair: Philippe Starck's Mirror-Polished Debut for Emeco

The Hudson is Philippe Starck's first chair for Emeco — a dining chair in mirror-polished or hand-brushed recycled aluminium, designed in 2000 for Ian Schrager's Hudson Hotel in New York. It reduced Emeco's 1944 Navy Chair to a narrower, more formal silhouette, and it now sits in the Museum of Modern Art's permanent design collection.

A hotel commission, not a catalogue exercise

Emeco's chairman Gregg Buchbinder met Starck at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York in 1998, the same year Buchbinder acquired the company. The collaboration that followed began with a specific brief rather than an open one: Ian Schrager had commissioned Starck to design the interiors of the Hudson Hotel on West 58th Street, and the dining and lounge chairs needed to come from somewhere. Starck turned to Emeco's aluminium and its Hanover, Pennsylvania workshop, and the result — launched in 2000 — became the Hudson Chair and, by extension, the opening move of a partnership that has since produced a dozen further Starck designs for the house.

What "hand-polished" costs in labour

The Hudson is built from the same 80%-recycled aluminium and the same Hanover factory as every other Emeco chair, formed and welded before finishing. Where it differs is the finish itself: the hand-brushed version follows the house's standard sequence, but the hand-polished Hudson adds roughly eight further hours of hand-buffing per chair to bring the aluminium to a true mirror shine rather than a matte or satin surface. That extra labour is the whole design argument — Starck was not adding ornament to the Navy Chair's form, he was removing the working-boat texture from it, buffing away the visible grinding marks that give the original 1006 its utilitarian character until what is left reads as jewellery rather than equipment.

Part of a longer recycling argument

The Hudson launched alongside a second Starck design for Emeco, the stackable Icon Chair, both shown at Milan's Salone del Mobile in 2000 as the first products under what Emeco and Starck called the Heritage Against Recycling project — an explicit goal of building chairs from recycled aluminium designed to last around 150 years, so that the material's second life outlasts most furniture's first. The Hudson's polish was never meant as decoration for its own sake inside that framing; it was evidence that a recycled-aluminium chair could be finished to the same standard as any new-material one, with nothing about the material excusing a lesser result.

From a hotel lobby to a museum vitrine

The Hudson Chair earned a 2000 Good Design Award from the Chicago Athenaeum in its launch year, and within a few years MoMA added one to its permanent collection, catalogued simply as "Philippe Starck. Hudson Chair. 2000," a gift from Emeco rather than a purchase. That distinction — hotel furniture that a museum chose to keep — is unusual for a chair designed to a commercial brief, and it is the clearest evidence that the Hudson reads as more than a period piece for one hotel lobby: it is treated as an object in its own right, independent of the room it was built for.

Objena carries the Hudson Chair at AUD 4,390 in hand-polished aluminium, alongside Starck's later Heritage Stacking Chair (AUD 3,700) as a lower-relief companion in the same finishing register. The wider Starck-for-Emeco run, from Hudson through Broom, is covered in the Emeco chapter.

Three questions

What is the Emeco Hudson Chair and who designed it? The Hudson is a dining chair in mirror-polished or hand-brushed aluminium, designed by Philippe Starck for Emeco in 2000 as a commission for Ian Schrager's Hudson Hotel in New York. It was the first design of Starck's long-running collaboration with the house.

What is the Hudson Chair made of, and why does the polished finish take longer to produce? Emeco builds it by hand from 80% recycled aluminium in its Hanover, Pennsylvania factory. The hand-brushed version follows the house's standard finishing steps; the hand-polished version adds roughly eight further hours of hand-buffing to bring the aluminium to a mirror shine.

Is the Hudson Chair held in any museum collections? Yes. The Museum of Modern Art in New York holds a Hudson Chair in its permanent design collection, catalogued as "Philippe Starck. Hudson Chair. 2000," a gift of the manufacturer.